The Lincoln Logue | Even Trump's Truth Social AI Is Sick of The Lies
Nothing says 'American exceptionalism' like suing your judges and buying your tech giants!
If it is starting to feel more and more like we are living in the early stages of a tyrannical regime, it’s because we are. This week, Trump learned the risk of building your own propaganda machine — and giving it AI. Tell it to “fact-check everything,” and it will, even if the biggest fact-check target is you. Just ask Elon Musk. Truth Social’s “Truth Search AI” was designed to deliver MAGA-friendly answers to MAGA-friendly questions — a closed loop of flattery disguised as information. But within days of launch, the bot was contradicting Trump on tariffs, elections, and crime, even naming Barack Obama the most popular president of the century. It’s the kind of betrayal you can only get from a creation you assumed was loyal because you paid for it.
While Trump’s AI was telling inconvenient truths, the White House was taking aim at history itself. The Smithsonian, home to everything from the Wright brothers’ plane to portraits of civil rights leaders, is now subject to a full ideological audit. Exhibits must “unify” and “celebrate” rather than confront — which is bureaucratese for “scrub out anything critical of America or its leaders.” In the courts, the administration decided subtlety was overrated and sued every single federal judge in Maryland for slowing down deportations by a mere two days.
Ron DeSantis unveiled a second immigration detention facility, proudly dubbed “Deportation Depot,” even as lawsuits pile up over the first one’s swampy conditions. And on the corporate front, the White House is reportedly considering buying a stake in Intel — a company Trump was publicly trashing days earlier — as part bailout, part power grab. From curated history to from mass lawsuits and mass detention, the through-line is simple: consolidate control, call it patriotism, and hope no one notices the contradiction.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let us get into the week that was.
Monday, August 11 — Trump’s Truth Search AI Fact-Checks its Maker
▌Because Trump either thinks he’s always right — or doesn’t get that AI learns from more than Truth Social posts.
The MAGA-friendly search engine built into Truth Social was supposed to be a walled garden for Trump-approved facts. Instead, “Truth Search AI” is handing out reality checks like it’s running an intervention. Ask it about tariffs, and it says there’s no evidence they boosted the stock market. Ask about 2020, and it flatly calls the stolen-election claim “baseless.” It even described crime in Washington, D.C. as “not totally out of control” — a rare statement in Trumpworld that didn’t require an all-caps panic headline.
The AI’s Fox News–heavy training data apparently wasn’t enough to override basic factual consistency. It has called the Trump family’s crypto ventures a conflict of interest, praised Obama’s popularity, and ventured into factual territory MAGA influencers spend years trying to discredit. Trump Media billed it as a strike against Big Tech censorship, yet it’s now undermining the very falsehoods the platform was built to reinforce. Users are sharing screenshots of the bot’s “off-script” moments across multiple platforms, turning its blunt responses into viral content that’s harder for Trump’s team to contain than the AI itself.
The feature comes from Perplexity, a company already accused of quietly scraping sites without permission, so controversy was inevitable. But Trump’s bigger problem is his failure to understand how AI works: If you train it to find factual answers, it’s going to apply that rule universally — including to you. It’s the political version of installing security cameras to catch your enemies and ending up on the footage yourself. A quick “update” could fix the glitch, but at the cost of revealing the project was never about truth. Until then, the bot is a digital whistleblower with perfect recall.
Source: The Independent