Trump Finds a New Benghazi – The Atlantic

Artificial intelligence entered the presidential race this week, but not in the way many might have expected. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Kamala Harris had CHEATED and hacked an image showing a large crowd of people cheering for her at a campaign stop in Michigan.

The media quickly and easily debunked the accusation (indeed, thousands of supporters were photographed from different angles); this was certainly not the deepfake crisis that experts have been warning about for years, in which the existence of high-fidelity synthetic media leaves the public unable to distinguish reality from fabrication. Nevertheless, Trump’s claims immediately made the rounds online, amplified not only by his supporters but also by pro-Harris accounts (to ridicule and condemn them) and by tech experts (to fact-check and debunk them). Some commentators also took the opportunity to speculate about Trump’s mental health, a persistent theme of the summer campaign. Was this post further evidence that the former president was losing control?

I have no clear idea of ​​Trump’s state of mind. But I do know that fact-checking and refuting such a claim is a fool’s game. Whether Trump believes what he says or not is largely irrelevant: what matters is that he says it, which invites others to participate.

Read: Trump's Latest Lie Is a Huge Eye-Opener

Trump is tapping into the unique dynamics of social media, exploiting both the algorithms that shape the information landscape and what it means for individual users to interact online. Loaded words and terms (which can also function as hashtags) are key; they’re sometimes called dog whistles, but linguists also call them signifiers. That term refers to the actual form of a word—how it looks on a page or screen, how it sounds to the ear, how it feels on the tongue—as opposed to its semantic meaning. What the AI ​​signifies in Trump’s message is not just a technology, but Trump’s superiority, his dominance, his mastery of all eventualities: He’s got it. He’s on it. Nothing escapes him.

Trump understands the raw emotion that posts and interactions evoke, the shock that all but the most jaded users feel when the likes and replies start pouring in and the dopamine receptors fire. And that’s what he’s giving his supporters: a talking point, a way to allow them to follow his lead by filling in the text boxes on their own screens. It’s a version of what’s known as the liar’s dividend: Now, every time supporters or the media write about Harris’s impressive crowds, there will be a pre-approved, ready-made response that can be processed. She helped him!

Of course, the use of signifiers is not a new tactic. Perhaps the best example to date is the word Benghazi, uttered incessantly by a certain segment of right-wing commentators, almost reflexively, in response to the mere mention of Hillary Clinton. As a signifier, Benghazi is derived from the 2012 attack on two U.S. government buildings in that Libyan city. Four Americans, including our ambassador, were killed. Then-Secretary of State Clinton was accused by her opponents of delaying the implementation of appropriate military countermeasures, which cost lives. Numerous congressional hearings followed, none of which proved Clinton’s negligence, but all of which consumed bandwidth and implanted the word in voters’ minds.

As a result, people who couldn’t locate Benghazi on a map nonetheless invoked it whenever someone touted Clinton’s experience or foreign policy acumen (the main selling points of her 2016 candidacy). Indeed, Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks how words are used in various published sources, shows a spike in Benghazi’s incidence not after 2012, when the event occurred, but around 2015, at the height of the presidential campaign that Clinton ultimately lost.

In this respect, even the oddly careful punctuation of Trump’s message about AI may not be unimportant. It functions a bit like the polysyllabic strangeness of Benghazi. The punctilious periods that abbreviate the acronym AI, the placement of the apostrophe: all of these communicate precision and specificity of knowledge, a mastery of what is happening. Trump has had them reluctantly. He knows exactly what it is.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that Trump was aware of any of this at the time he posted. This is not another argument from Trump as a multidimensional chess master. Whatever tactics lie behind this post, they are a product of Trump’s reflexive use of the media—his instinct to disrupt the narrative and shift the discourse—as well as his reckless disregard for the truth and his consistent treatment of almost all language as mere filler, or bluster, malleable and transformable to his own ends.

Read: Elon Musk organizes a rally for Trump

But Trump’s most effective means have never been entirely arbitrary. In the case of AI, the means feeds on many of his supporters’ inherent distrust of the media, as well as their legitimate fears about the threat of deepfakes and a paranoid belief that Democrats and the so-called deep state must surely have such technologies (and are ready to use them). The means also feeds on their desire to believe that Harris herself is some kind of synthetic candidate, manufactured to specifications and illegitimately inserted into the electoral process.

Is there anything we can do to counter this behavior? Fact-checking may be necessary, but it will never be enough. It is an entirely reactive approach, successful only by giving its subject, however unfounded, undeserved consideration. The best solution might be to play a more tactical and targeted version of Trump’s game. This is where JD Vance’s alleged (and disproven) illicit relationship with a couch comes into play.

Some media outlets have criticized the meme, which is popular on the left. How is this different from Trump’s endless lies? The couch meme may be sick and unflattering, but it doesn’t attempt to distort the truth of an actual event. It posits a non-event, and the fact that the original tweet included false references to Vance’s own memoir also made it easier to fact-check; an untruth with its own built-in refutation.

Not everything that is factually false is subject to the same penalty as disinformation, and not all untruths work in the same way. The Vance couch meme does not demonstrate that Democrats are poisoning the information landscape to the same extent that Trump is, creating more work for all the hapless gatekeepers of accuracy. It uses parody and humor to provide an outlet for people’s disgust at an individual who seems to take an inordinate interest in the intimate activities of others. Mockery and ridicule operate in a different register than outright fabrication. They are effective communication tactics not because they are false, but because they can achieve a unique kind of accuracy.

Both AI and Vance’s couch are signifiers, fungible tokens in the collective language game that is the internet. Democrats shouldn’t have to apologize, certainly not until the internet becomes a much less fertile place for right-wing lies, memes, and disinformation campaigns, which are far more harmful overall. By recognizing language games for what they are, it’s possible to be a more responsible player while still nudging the odd nudge.

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