by liberal japonicus
It’s a small drop in the ocean of crap, but the deranged post about Rob Reiner’s death on Trump’s account on Truth Social has me wonder. This Axios piece will get you up to speed if you were blissfully unaware of this. I would observe that seeing pieces like this makes me think that all those people who wrote ‘This is the day Trump became president’ articles lauding some miniscule effort on his part have repurposed their skill set.
Almost all of the pieces about Trump and Reiner neither (with good reason) link to the Truth Social post nor quote it verbatim. However, that’s a bit unfortunate, because after the accusation of Trump Derangement Syndrome, there is this:
He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,
If Trump actually wrote that, the section in bold is quite strange, because it sounds like what a third person would write. I realize it might be fanciful to think that cette espèce de merde orange would hold to discourse norms, and the whole process of referring to oneself in the third person (illeism if you want to know the technical term) is something we might expect of Trump and his inflated notions of self-importance, but to me, this really sounds like someone else is writing it.
I don’t want to suggest this is some incredible discovery. One has to assume that almost everyone with a social media presence has got a team of people churning out content. There was the controversy when it was revealed that George Takei had a team helping him with his popular facebook page. And Trump’s literacy skills notwithstanding, his employment of Tony Schwartz as the ghostwriter on Art of the Deal would certainly indicate a pattern. I’m wondering if we will ever get a look behind that screen. Are the writers true believers or guys (I have to imagine it is only men, not only because I can’t imagine Trump hiring women to write for him, though there could be some mashup of Kristi Noem and Caroline Levitt in the Trump Truth Social writing room pitching ideas, I suppose)
An open thread about US politics, if you can keep whatever you may be snacking on down.
Isn’t this in a sense a claim that one of HIS followers did the deed*?
Not even true but would be typical. It has to be about HIM.
The trolls take another angle: Biden’s drug and immigration policy.
Without Sleepy Joe there would be no drug problem and no drug dealing and pet eating darkies in the country, so the son would never have gone down the dark path. Of course in that case it would be the liberal upbringing (or violent video games or satanic rock-n-roll or…).
Btw, some trolls have the audacity to compare HIS spoilt (b)rats favorably to Reiner’s son (no drugs there and they would never go after HIM).
*which would make it by definition righteous, so no problem there.
Hartmut, I suppose one could read it like that, but I’m just pointing out that linguistically, the wording is a bit implausible as something authored by Trump, which then has me imagining some writers’ room where they are churning out these truth social posts. Gemini tells me that he averages 15-20 a day but that’s skewed, and it was mentioned that he posted 160 times in a single evening.
“…to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump…”
‘of’ is a very strange preposition to use here. i can’t think of a way in which it could be considered correct.
and this:
“…with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.”
is a hideous mess.
whoever writes these doesn’t care much about grammar.
It’s been obvious for some time that many (most?, virtually all?) of the Truth Social posts are written by someone else. Too many long sentences, too many big words, too long, just flat out too many posts. Which also may explain the use of the third person, althouth Trump has taken to doing that when speaking.
At minimum, Trump rants about something, a minion writes it down, cleans up the wording, and enters it — which I would guess is what happened, at least in part, with the Rob Reiner post. More often, someone else drafts a post, reads it to Trump to get his approval, and then posts it. And sometimes (for example the middle of the night posts) someone just echoes his style. Albeit with better syntax and a far bigger vocabulary than Trump ever uses.
An AI generating Trump’s social media posts?
Seems plausible.
It’s the modern equivalent of “infinite number of monkeys at typewriters”, except that the “typewriters” are smartphones, the number of monkeys isn’t infinite, and the monkeys are brain-damaged.
I don’t doubt that a significant portion of Orange’s posts are written by someone (or something?) else, but I wouldn’t necessarily attribute his late-night/early-morning posts to someone else just because of the time of day. That guy’s a total f**king weirdo who is obsessed with himself and lacks impulse control.
He’s patient zero for TDS. It’s a different disease than he thinks it is.
Not US politics, sorry, but good news from the UK. Might this be the beginning of a bigger shift?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/16/uk-to-rejoin-eu-erasmus-student-exchange-programme
I still regret not having taken part in my time.
I guess I have been assuming that he wrote his own posts on the assumption that even his core supporters in his top admin aren’t dumb enough to write that shit.
I would not discount He Who Slumbers as the “author” of those based on the language and the weird syntax. There’s often a disconnect between people’s spoken and written vocabularies that happens because one is synchronous and extemporaneous and the other is asynchronous and somewhat iterative. The Ancient Orange One could very well type part of it, get suggestions from AI that get incorporated, and then riff on the AI suggestions in ways that undo part of the coherence forced upon the first draft by the suggestions. They all read like patchwriting to me. He could be pissed and ranting, set it aside for an AI check and a McNugget, seize hold of a suggestion and then try to kick that suggestion up with his own special spin on it.
What I see is not so different from any freshman first draft done too late at night in a fit of pique.
So put me down as a vote for “it’s him – with slight input from an inanimate assistant.”
I pretty much agree with nous, and did so as soon as I read lj’s post. Referring to himself in the third person in this way has been a frequent ploy of his (God knows what he thinks it conveys – I believe that psychiatrists categorise it as a sign of some kind of disorder, but can’t remember which), and as for the illiterate grammar etc which cleek notes, I find that utterly unsurprising. I hadn’t thought of the use of AI, but that would be unsurprising too.
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
The only error my grammar checker found was using “of” instead of “with.” I would expect more grammatical errors unless whoever the writer is is using a grammar checker.
Gemini says that there’s no explicit evidence of AI being used in the past two weeks of Trump’s Truth Social postings.
“Based on an analysis of Donald Trump’s Truth Social timeline from December 2, 2025, to December 16, 2025, there is no evidence that the text of his posts is AI-generated. Conversely, the text exhibits strong markers of his established human writing style.”
No AI Text, Some AI Media
Previously to this discussion, I assumed that Trump’s posts were all his and expressed who he is. I wondered why some staffer person wasn’t assigned the job of constantly checking and removing his posts. Then I read this excerpt from a a discussion about his top office manager: “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”
So Trump unleashed and uncensored, served straight without a mixer, is her goal. And if he stays up all night broadcasting out his character deficiencies and mental issues, so be it.
CharlesWT – there’s AI content, and there’s AI generated autofill suggestions. He would not use the forer out of pride, but the latter is a fair game.
Hegseth has proposed a plan to significantly reduce the number of four-star generals. The proposal appears to be consistent with the recently released National Security Strategy: increase the focus on the Americas and reduce attention to Europe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pete-hegseth-to-slash-4-star-generals-in-pentagon-shake-up/ar-AA1St2RB
Charles, I think you need a better grammar checker!
I have been assuming that he wrote his own posts on the assumption that even his core supporters in his top admin aren’t dumb enough to write that shit.
Seems like a bad assumption. At least based on the stuff they say in public on their own behalf.
The grammar checker is good at catching most errors. It did suggest that “An unfortunate” should replace “A very sad”. But that’s a style choice.
But who writes 62-word run-on sentences on a social media platform without grammatical errors? It gives the impression of premeditation, not off-the-cuff.
Trump has takento referring to himself in the third person, so the usage here doesn’t indicate whether he wrote it or not.
TBH I’m not sure if it’s better or worse if he did.
Speaking of Wiles, she has apparently gone on record sayingshe thinks that he has the mind of an alcoholic, only without the booze. Dry drunk would explain a lot. But then again, so would dementia plus flagrant narcissism.
The man is not well.
A tidbit: Michele Reiner photographed Trump for the cover of The Art of the Deal.
i’ve always assumed he writes his own social media junk. i doubt anyone else could really understand what’s going on in his head and so would eventually end up contradicting what Trump actually thinks. and then Trump would have corrected it. but i don’t think we’ve seen that.
i’m sure he posts things that were co-/written by other people now and then. but the rants are all him.
The administration announced they will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research because “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” Last summer I toured NCAR’s supercomputer center in Cheyenne, WY. The center provides free access to supercomputer resources to hundreds/thousands of university earth sciences researchers who would not otherwise have access to that sort of computing power. The center is jointly funded by the NSF and the State of Wyoming (U of Wyoming researchers get priority scheduling for time on the machines).
I found the data portion of the center as interesting as the processing part. The center includes curated content from the massive set of atmosphere and ocean observations collected by NOAA. On the tour, they would open one of the rack doors and let me stick my nose in with the processing blades. The data facility was inside two layers of bulletproof glass.
I don’t know re authorship. I do know there really isn’t an antidote to such a terrible comment. James Woods’ heartfelt tribute to Rob Reiner is, however, a start.
https://x.com/JesseBWatters/status/2000754643865891146?s=20
Disclaimer: I know it’s Fox News, something I don’t watch. This was linked to on a blog I read and is well worth the listen, IMO. I do give credit to Watters getting out of the way (mostly) and letting Woods express himself.
at least some of the GOP are not happy with Trump’s Reiner reaction.
but, Jim Geraghty is impure enough in his Republicanism to be a regular at WaPo. so we shouldn’t take him as a representative sample of the base.
Damn. I posted another link from the Atlantic (see Wiles thread) about the Trump Reiner quotes, but unbeknown to me the extract I also copied had too many links (5), so it’s awaiting approval. So here, at least, is the full link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-rob-reiner/685280/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCTLKSpntcAyNF4mSlC9MB3U&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Is He, Trump the world’s most efficient thumb typist?
I have always assumed that, whatever else may be true, He does not produce his screeds by typing on a cellphone, complete with punctuation and CAPITALIZATION, while sitting on one of his golden toilets. But maybe I’m wrong, being unpracticed in phone typing myself.
–TP
possibly apropos, from LGM which links to this CNN article
Other presidents receive similarly politicized descriptions, such as former President Barack Obama.
“Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” the plaque reads. It dings him for passing what Trump calls “the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act” and signing “the one-sided Paris Climate Accords.”
and
The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement when asked for more information about who’s paying for them.
My general rule is that everything that comes out of Leavitt’s mouth, including and, but, and the, is a lie, so there must be a writer’s room of monkeys churning out this shit.
“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
Michael’s citation of this MAGAt justification for closing NCAR reminds me of the Homer Simpson solution to a Check Engine light: stick a piece of electrical tape over it. Morons rule. Even deMAGAfication may not save us.
–TP
what a child
As an undergrad in Boulder, I used to make a trip to NCAR a handful of times a semester to collect signatures for grants for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (I was a grant courier there for two year). They did a lot of grant work with NCAR, including a lot of grants I remember that were doing some of that important work on climate change that drew all that fire from He Who Slumbers’ quid-pro-donors.
To quote Droopy Dog, “This makes me mad.”