White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Woman Behind Trump’s Overnight Truth Social Raging

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President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likes to say that his administration is the most transparent in history. Possibly, she is right.

That is, if you think letting it all hang out is the kind of transparency Leavitt has in mind.

Certainly, it all hangs out in a way we have never seen in Washington. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a kind of television studio where he insults the press, talks to foreign leaders and, on occasion, berates them (Ukraine, South Africa and Canada) in front of the press.

Then there is the president’s late-night posting on Truth Social, when a meteor shower of invective, scorn, misinformation, disinformation, self-adulation, and allegations, interspersed with policy declarations, reveals him unedited. In those posts, he has urged colonizing Greenland, taking over Canada and, recently, adding Venezuela as the 51st state.

All of it set about with capital letters, exclamation points and AI-generated pictures — some of the most offensive ones have included Trump as Jesus, the Obamas as apes and, more recently, Illinois Gov. JD Pritzker gorging on an enormous hamburger.

The insults keep coming, accusing enemies and even his predecessors of being weak, having low IQs and, of course, being “losers.” In this scathing and self-aggrandizing stream, some are even traitors, including former President Barack Obama. Arrest him!

It is a bravura performance without equal. It is also hugely popular with diehard devotees of the president. His account on Truth Social has 12.5 million subscribers. One night recently, there were 55 posts — some clearly composed and some forwarded from right-wing sources, alleging conspiracies, malfeasance or trumpeting Trump.

Journalists assigned to read them have called them variously rampages, rants, wild sprees and storms. But read them, they must.

This is Trump in a stream of consciousness, unvarnished, and an essential source of news because what the president of the United States says is news.

Traces of varnishing have been appearing: The number of spelling mistakes, bizarre word formations and grammatical errors has gone down, even as the volume has accelerated.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed the unseen hand on the keyboard. It is the hand of Natalie Harp, the president’s personal assistant, an influential but unsung force in the White House.

Harp, according to the Journal, scours fringe news and social media for repostable comments and produces AI-generated illustrations. She then hands them to Trump. He selects and adds them to his own comments, and a post is born.

Sometimes the posting is feverish. The night the Iran War began, there were more than 90 posts.

Harp, 34, is the epitome of a Christian conservative, coming from a religious family in California and attending two Christian-right universities, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. She came to Trump’s attention when she was reporting and hosting for the ultra-conservative television network One America News. He asked her to join his presidential campaign.

Don’t think that Trump and Harp’s overnight spewing is wasted. He has all those followers on Truth Social, but his real strength is that the mainstream media is obliged to quote some of his comments daily.

What Trump says on Truth Social is also heard around the world. It isn’t just journalists who follow it; nations have to pay attention. In capitals from Tehran to Moscow, London to Beijing, Trump-raging is essential reading.

The Trump Show, for that is what it is, is a radical departure from how presidents have traditionally communicated with the public. Trump posts directly, sometimes without regard for how his words will be received.

It used to be that speeches were the window through which the world could see how an American president was thinking. They were crafted, agonized over, passed around, redrafted and sometimes delivered with last-minute handwritten additions or subtractions by the president.

They were policy documents for the present and the future. With Trump, it is the improvisations that inform or confuse.

Presidential speeches through the years have given us history’s milestones, whether it was Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or FDR’s First Inaugural Address.

Who can forget the speeches of JFK in Berlin, Reagan at the Berlin Wall or Obama in Cairo?

With Trump, it is the firehose delivery that is remembered, especially in overnight posts. Transparent?

In the Turmoil, Challenges for Graduates in the Class of ’26

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Dear Graduates of 2026,

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

Watch Out When the Political Class Forgets Cause and Effect

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Anyone who has spent time in criminal court knows this: One of the characteristics of lawbreakers is a poorly developed sense of cause and effect.

At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night of drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it and spend the rest of the useful years of his life in prison.

The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and, while there, calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.

This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort.

We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries.

Bomb people, and you will get a massive refugee problem.

Deny medical funding, and you will get overburdened emergency rooms.

Underfund science, and the talent will pop up somewhere else, like the universities of Europe and Asia.

Cut off immigration, and you will have deflation from population decline.

Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.

Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt, and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.

Action has consequences, just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: “A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”

Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:

Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement.

Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.

Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon.

Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.

Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers.

Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.

Cause: Undermine the elections by falsely claiming that they were rigged.

Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.

Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt.

Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.

All governments make mistakes, and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different. The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long.

Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.

Now, political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.

Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects, long and often.

If it goes, the cause will be forgotten, but the effect will endure.

The Electricity Future for New England: Uncertainty and High Prices

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These days, in terms of resources, New England is poorly positioned to make electricity. As Gregg Cornett, president of Rhode Island Energy, told me in an interview, it doesn’t sit on abundant coal reserves and natural gas — the critical fuel in today’s electricity generating mix — or hide beneath the surface, waiting for the gasman’s drill.

Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region.

Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region’s utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).

Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished.

In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge.

Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.

This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.

The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar.

At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Donald Trump, but the future is hopeful in years to come.

Cornett says Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.

The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.

There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.

According to the 1840 U.S. census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.”

Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity.

In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone in Waterford, Connecticut, with two reactors, and Seabrook in Seabrook, New Hampshire, with one reactor.

All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.

Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead.

Electric utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather.

You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.

A Revolutionary Calls Out the Utility Industry

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The demand for electricity continues to rise, and there is a wide recognition that there is going to be pressure on the grid as never before, and that it is time to think about the grid in new ways. 

We need to think about how it operates, how it might operate, and the technologies — including artificial intelligence as a tool in its management as well as a demand stimulator — that could assist in developing a more-reliable, better-balanced grid going forward.

The grid, after all, is the infrastructural backbone of how our society operates; how we live and how we will live. Almost everything, from transportation to manufacturing, from the humblest kitchen appliance to the heating and cooling of homes, will be powered through electricity. Its ubiquity is real today and will be more so tomorrow.

So if we are to have an electricity hegemony, we had better lay down some coordinating philosophy.

Over the last half century, two visionaries have shaped the dimensions of the electricity supply system in America. Initially neither of them was received with enthusiasm, but their impact has been profound.

The first was S. David Freeman, who headed the energy policy staff in the White House Office of Science and Technology during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and who, in 1974, received funding from the Ford Foundation to examine the energy crisis and suggest future options. His study, “A Time To Choose,” was seminal and started new thinking about growth and conservation.

Freeman would become president of the Tennessee Valley Authority and in turn several other big public utilities, including the Lower Colorado River Authority and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

The second, and the most influential thinker, was Amory Lovins. In a single article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1976, Lovins introduced the concepts of “soft power” that would lead to today’s renewable energy revolution. His study was called, after Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

Both men were criticized for their conclusions: Freeman for introducing the idea of conservation as being a part of the energy mix, and Lovins for wholesale support of conservation, wind and solar, opposition to big central stations, and a small-is-beautiful philosophy. He opposed big, new nuclear power plants.

Lovins, who is chairman emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, which he founded, wasn’t criticized so much as vilified. Seldom has a public intellectual been so attacked – or been so effective, leaving an indelible mark that can be seen on rooftops and in the ubiquity of wind turbines.

I knew both men well and frequently debated Lovins on nuclear and other issues before various audiences. While I agreed with his overall idea that there were other ways forward in energy, many of his visions either weren’t viable or he had reached too far in his arguments.

Over the years, I wrote a lot about Lovins and provided platforms for his ideas.

Now the battle for the electric industry’s future is joined by another revolutionary thinker about the future of electricity supply.

He is Chase Weir, whom I think of as a dreamer who is tethered to the ground by experience, an idealist who knows the reality of keeping the lights on, and a doer who will change other people’s thinking by example as much as by proselytizing.

Weir created the Earthshot Foundation in 2008, co-founded Distributed Sun in 2009, and truCurrent, its spin-off, in 2024. He has laid out his ideas in a series of three Forbes articles (he is a member of the Forbes Business Council), published over the last three months. They approach the electric utility challenge differently, philosophically.

He paints a picture of an industry that is misdirected in its responses to market stimuli. He sees a market that is seeking to build generation against its highest demand – a cold day in winter at 6 p.m. — when electricity use is at its peak. 

If this were a financial market, Weir argues, this demand stress would signal market illiquidity and there would be measures to rectify it.

Weir sees a future where the kilowatt-hour becomes, in effect, currency and which has to be managed as such, aiming for flexibility and liquidity. 

Nothing or truly little, he believes, is as important to modern life as dependable, abundant, and environmentally wise electricity.

He has four cardinal rules for achieving this:

  1. Get the intent right. Intent is the driver and needs to be a force in utility planning.
  2. Non-zero thinking. This is the concept, expounded by the author Robert Wright, that one value doesn’t necessarily degrade a competing value. That is distinct from net-zero, which applies quite differently to carbon reduction, but can be confused.
  3. Time is the vital element and must be understood in the mix. All actions, including regulation, market design and flow must be cognizant of time. Weir talks about “return on time” as being similar to return on investment.
  4. The objectives of a liquid KWh market can be achieved with the new tools of energy storage, renewables and traditional generation working in concert through microgrids and similar arrangements managed by AI.

Above all, Weir emphasizes, is item No. 1: intent. Get that right and the rest can fall into place.

Traditionally, Weir believes, profit for utilities has been tied to return on investment not on performance. To achieve a functioning liquid KWh market, a modern grid must be designed to dynamically employ the available resources of technology, capital, capability and time.

He told me, “If we don’t design with intent and seek liquidity, we will lock in decades of systemic failure.”

It seems to me that the price, quantity and reliability of electricity are all open issues and Weir is onto something. More of everything is needed, including a clear understanding of where we are going and how we are going to get there. 

Weir is driving the thinking with his question: “What does a truer, better, smarter, future-proof grid look like?Thinking is good, essential actually, as we careen down the electric highway.

My Happy Place Is on a Train, Including Amtrak

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This is being written on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train 171, in coach, en route from Providence, R.I., to New York. I am in my happy place.

I am a trainman. Given a choice, I would ride the rails over any other mode of transport — except flying, when I owned a plane.

Something happens to me when the train pulls out of the station. I get a sense of well-being. Rail travel does things for my soul; it puts me in a place of euphoric comfort. Everything becomes possible; things are good and may get better.

Ships do something similar — not cruise liners but ships going somewhere; ships providing transportation not geared to escapism, working ships.

I can trace my train addiction to a journey when I was 5 years old. It was the longest train trip ever, and I wouldn’t care to repeat it, although it was the greatest: the adventure of adventures.

It was a train trip from Cape Town, South Africa, to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). It took six days; it was a long, long time on the train. The distance from Cape Town to Harare is slightly more than 1,500 miles, but the train wound through endless miles of desert in what was then Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and stopped for long periods to water.

It was, of course, a steam train and steam engines are big, beautiful, thirsty monsters. They could carry enough coal for a fair distance of travel, but water was essential and pumping in remote stretchers of the Kalahari Desert was a slow business, and at times the pumps had to be operated by hand. That could mean hours to water the engine. (British actor Reginald Gardiner, on the Decca label in 1934, recorded this fabulous bit about railway steam engines) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBTOy8YqiQg

But as someone said to me years later, “There is plenty of time in Botswana.”

Later, I would ride an overnight train from Salisbury to Umtali (now Mutare, Zimbabwe) to supervise the production of a newspaper. I rode second class and usually shared a carriage with another man, and sometimes a third and a fourth. As a teenager, I thought of those long discussions through the night as my university.

More steam trains in England, but much faster. The British steam locomotives, before the switchover to diesel, scooped up water from open rail-side troughs as they rushed by at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.

My work took me weekly by train to Scotland or the North of England, and at times to the Midlands. Those trips were always an adventure in the people I talked to, the great meals on board, and the wonder of falling asleep to the click-clack of the rails.

I took the overnight train to France, before the Channel Tunnel, when the train would leave London, make its way to the coast, be loaded in the dead of night onto a steamer, and continue in France the next day. Good night in England and bonjour in France.

In the 1960s, you could still take a sleeper train from Washington to New York. It isn’t very far and doesn’t require a sleeper, but many took it because it was fun and saved them a hotel stay in New York. Now, Amtrak will get you there in three hours, no muss, no fuss, no romance.

I have train-traveled in Russia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, and I am frequently on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains. Amtrak’s on-train service is excellent, with courteous and helpful conductors, but booking tickets on its site requires an AI agent or a tech-savvy kid to fathom.

Twice this year, as my wife and I were heading from Washington to Rhode Island on the last Northeast Regional train of the day, we were told that the train would “terminate” in New York, due to a problem on the line north of the city. Things do happen in train travel.

Both times, Amtrak failed to offer any suggestion on how the stranded passengers might complete their journeys. Many of the stranded were students and people who couldn’t afford a New York hotel room or a car rental. Quite a few of the stranded didn’t speak English very well.

In the first stranding, we were warned by the sole representative Amtrak had assisting abandoned passengers at the Moynihan Train Hall in New York that not everyone would be able to catch the first or second train out in the morning. He graciously said that our original tickets would be honored on whichever train we could use to continue our journey north.

On neither occasion did we wait for Amtrak’s gracelessness to play out: We took an Uber home on the first, and a Lyft (a bit cheaper) on the second. For each road trip home, we paid more than $600, including tips.

But I am a constant lover, and I am still riding the rails. Happy man typing!

Don’t Let AI Get Away Without Helping You: Iterate

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I haven’t had a good relationship with the Age of Computing. I don’t understand computers, but I believe they understand me. And that is the problem.

The first time I used an ATM machine, I expected it to sneer at my balance — and to do it aloud, so everyone in range could hear. It didn’t, but I kept my doubts.

Fast-forward to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I have been writing and broadcasting about AI with brio, traveling to conferences across the United States and Europe, and questioning the great and knowledgeable in giant tech companies and universities. I have put these experts on television and quoted them in columns.

When it comes to my own use of AI, I am in fear. I was worried about ATMs, but I have been trembling before AI and its awesomeness.

Now, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has guided me, and I am at peace with AI.

I thought, until my recent epiphany, that the AI assistants would laugh at my puerile prompts and resent me bothering them. Assiduously, I have been saying “please” and “thank you” to all the AI assistants, even China’s DeepSeek.

I was sure that, at some level, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini were in cahoots; that no matter which assistant I used, these AI masters of the universe had a file on me and it was loaded with derisive comments like “He is pea-brained” and “He doesn’t have a pot to tinkle in.”

Not now. Not since I read an article in the Harvard Business Review, authored by Nicholas Jennings Hallman, the brilliant accounting professor at UT’s McCombs School of Business. He is also the school’s senior scholar for AI initiatives.

Hallman has been studying, in partnership with the giant accounting and consulting firm KPMG, how workers are using AI. Conclusion: They are way underusing it.  Most workers and recreational users are just skimming the surface of what AI can do to help them. They are turning on the car’s engine without going anywhere.

Resoundingly, Hallman and KPMG found in their study that workers used AI assistants, for example, to draft an email or solve a minor problem. But if the AI assistant they used didn’t provide the answer they were seeking, they either gave up or thought there wasn’t an answer.

Hallman’s answer is to “iterate.” Keep asking, push AI assistants to do better, and they will. It can be the main show, not a side event.

In a recent appearance on “White House Chronicle” on PBS (whchronicle.com), he said, “Some of what we found in the work we’ve done here with KPMG is that the most productive users are those who ask a question often and get back a less-than-satisfactory response, but they iterate until they get back something that is satisfactory and learn along the way — so that the next time, they can get the same satisfactory response with fewer iterations.”

Hallman urged: Don’t be afraid of how often you ask a question or modify it.

Too many workers, a majority, according to the UT/KPMG study, are prepared to accept one-and-done rather than pushing an AI assistant for more. Hallman also said users should give an AI assistant enough to work with. State the task in a way that authorizes it to dig deeper.

When “White House Chronicle” co-host Adam Clayton Powell III asked about security, reminding Hallman that emails, which were never supposed to be public, can end up in the wrong hands, Hallman said there is little chance of your privacy being violated by AI use or of your interactions with AI going public. Also, he said, there are security measures that a corporation or sensitive user can employ, including using a modified AI assistant or totally disengaging from the wider net.

Hallman doesn’t recommend that workers use voice interaction with AI. He said he has found it is less efficient and the answers tend to be more superficial.

However, Hallman said that when driving long distances, he uses voice-activated AI to learn about subjects he knows little about. He said he did this with black holes in space because he wanted to know more about them.

Many leaders in the AI firmament, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, have said that AI  won’t replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.

Clearly, the unsaid thing isn’t that you use AI, but how well you use it. It isn’t enough to ask one question, as Hallman said. You must make AI work for you if you plan to stay in work yourself.

Democratic Graybeards Detail Tools Trump May Use To Negate Midterms

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After two long, dark years, there is an optimism afoot among Democrats, many independents, and a few old-school Republicans that the clouds will part and the sun will shine brightly again on Nov. 4.

Most votes in the midterms will be counted, and Democrats believe the House will have flipped Democratic with a decent majority. They are daring to hope that the Senate, too, will be theirs. The Trump presidency, its opponents hope, will be firmly marked “lame duck.”

Better, they hope the years of Trump raging, as they see it, outside of his constitutional authority and acting illegally, will be over.

It is fantasized that he will be trussed and restricted from authoritarian governance; that his claims of having a mandate will have been repudiated.

But Trump isn’t a man who takes reversals easily. So there is widespread fear that he will find some way to negate the results of the Nov. 3 ballot, and that Nov. 4 will see him crowing, declaring victory, and being more determined than ever to act as an authoritarian.

Two of the most revered and admired members of the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado for 12 years in the House before entering the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri for 26 years in the House and rose to become majority leader, have been studying the emergency powers they fear might be used to obstruct the midterms.

The Democratic graybeards state: “Over the past several months, we have been examining the structure of presidential emergency authorities, particularly Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) and related to continuity of government provisions. These authorities have existed for decades. What has changed is the context in which they might be used.”

It is these documents, and how they might be used with new intent by Trump and his allies, that alarm the senior Democrats.

They point out that the cadre of Trump loyalists who supported his claim that he won the 2020 election are seeking ways to overcome the Democratic victory in the midterms.

Wirth and Gephardt state: “Actors involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election remain active and are again discussing the use of a national emergency to justify federal intervention in election administration.

“At the same time, federal law enforcement has been used directly in relation to contested election processes, and the president has called for federal control over aspects of voting while describing domestic opponents in terms that go well beyond ordinary political language.”

Wirth and Gephardt wonder if “taken together” these developments raise the question of “whether emergency authorities of uncertain scope, capable of rapid implementation and subject to limited oversight, could be brought to bear in a domestic political context before Congress or the courts can respond effectively.”

Clearly, the former members of Congress believe the administration will find pretexts to either subvert the vote, challenge the result, or set aside the entire election on emergency grounds.

The first moves are underway to limit mail-in voting and not to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Before Congress, the SAVE America Act will impose what its opponents say are excessive voter identification requirements, including proof of citizenship, supposedly to prevent non-citizens from voting. No evidence that this is a problem has been produced.

Trump has added to the uncertainty in one statement, suggesting that his administration is so successful that no election is needed. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked that back, but the intimation lingers.

My belief is that in no way will there be a smooth transfer of power if the Democrats win the midterms, and that the full apparatus of emergency powers could be employed to negate the result.

The president has produced an extraordinary convulsion in the country, and it is unlikely to be corrected as easily as by the midterm elections.

Trump, who can widely be inconsistent in what he says, even in the same speech, remains consistent in his claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent. No evidence of this has ever been found despite exhaustive investigations, but he remains firm on that allegation.

He will at least make that claim about the midterms if the results go against him.

Of course, a lot happens in a single month of the Trump administration, and there are seven months until the elections.

What is certain is that if the Democrats triumph in the midterms, Trump will use every tool of the executive to frustrate the new Congress. A wild elephant is a dangerous creature when antagonized.

Summer Is Too Important for Politics to Steal

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If you can get your mind off the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, if you can stop checking your 401(K), which seems to have taken off for the dark side of the moon, if you can turn off the cable news channels and do a quick personal inventory, noting that your arms, legs and enough of your mind are still functioning, then you are ready for the balm of summer.

I had always thought that summer culture was epitomized by the French fleeing Paris during August. But the summer migration that renews, whether it is to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or to Botswana, is just as important to Americans.

People need to get away. Staycation is an oxymoron, like airline food.

Americans live for summer and nothing will keep them from the beaches, lakes, mountains and resorts of their bounteous native land. But an increasing number go abroad.

Beware. We might not be as welcome in that great bistro in Montmartre where we often supped, or on the delightful beach in Crete where we once sunned. There are just too many tourists trying to do the same things all over Europe, and more are planning to go.

Americans are part of a new phenomenon, known as overtourism. We were the first mass tourists in the world, but we have since been joined by people of other nationalities, many of whom think they must see Venice, visit the Acropolis, and walk Britain’s Lake District. Not in high summer you won’t, and if you do, you will pay high fees and face various gentle disincentives.

The problem is that more and more people can afford to travel, and they do.

In his 1961 musical “Sail Away,” Noel Coward wrote, “Why do the wrong people travel?” If Coward were alive today, he might write, “Why do so many people travel?”

Curious Germans and inquiring Americans have long since been joined by regiments of Japanese picture-taking tourists. Now the Chinese, too, feel they must gaze upon the Mona Lisa, and the Indians want to see the Highland cattle of Scotland, affectionately referred to as “hairy coos.”

The solution: Go early or go late, if Europe is your destination. There is much to enjoy in what the professionals of the travel industry call the “shoulder season,” which is from about now until late June — and from September to October. Some places like Dubrovnik and Venice are unable to accommodate mass tourism in the summer, and have prevented cruise ships from docking.

About cruising: My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I used to build our vacations around horseback riding, taking our boots and hats with us wherever we went in the world. Then, reluctantly, we took our first cruise. We had misgivings about cruise ships, thinking of them as floating holiday camps. In fact, cruising is a way of taking the hotel with you.

Our first cruise, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was from Greece through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea, and it was magnificent. We went to places we would never have seen if left to ourselves, like Yalta, Odesa, and Constanta, and we had great tours in all of them. We were enchanted from the moment we stepped on board in Athens to our disembarkation in Venice. Also, I was able to visit Istanbul for the first time.

Another memorable cruise was around Cape Horn from Argentina to Chile with plenty of stops in some of the most delightful and unusual towns such as Punta Arenas, Ushuaia and Puerto Montt. To be cruising the treacherous body of water at the bottom of the world, where so many mariners perished, in a luxury liner, is to marvel at technology and your own good luck.

Our most delightful cruise, perhaps, was last year when we took Cunard’s stately Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic from New York to Southampton. This cruise reached levels that were near ecstasy for us.

The crossing entertainment featured conductor Anthony Inglis with members of the UK’s National Symphony Orchestra. Inglis assembled a passenger choir — complete with auditions and rehearsals — which gave two rousing concerts.

In the interests of harmony, I stayed in the audience, but my wife made it into the chorus and was elated that her long-unused gifts as a soprano were still there.

You have to love a man who travels with an orchestra. That, as they say, is class. And to think that we were once snobbish about cruising.

We learned that Inglis will conduct the NSO on the Sept. 5 to 12 QM2 crossing from New York to Southampton. This was music to our ears.

Tech Giants Will Boost Nuclear but Won’t Help With Your Bill

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There is an abiding faith that if someone is good at one thing, they must be good at many things. At heart, it is a belief that outside the metaphorical box, there is much greater ability than inside it.

This is once again on display with widespread enthusiasm for the idea that the looming shortage of electricity can be solved by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta because they have been so wildly successful at what they do — and have mountains of cash to demonstrate it. Also, it is thought they will somehow do it better than the entrenched utilities.

The argument is that those who use vast new quantities of electricity for data centers will pay for its generation, and somehow the rest of the electricity supply system will be unaffected. It won’t.

The new dedicated generators will still buy steel, connectors (wires), transformers, switches, and the myriad bits that go to generating and transmitting electricity. They will still buy uranium, natural gas, strain the gas pipelines and the transmission system.

They will still buy available solar cells, wind turbines and dominate the competition to site these. They will be exerting four-square price pressure for all supplies, including utility-scale batteries.

The data center-dedicated generator will still compete in the labor marketplace for precious skilled workers, now in perilous short supply as the utility industry, without counting data center generators, spends well over $2 billion yearly on upgrading its systems.

I am not saying it isn’t a good thing to shake up the utility industry. I am saying not to expect magical new electricity developments that won’t affect everyone. The bills will still come, and they will be hefty.

Also, big tech will learn some sharp and costly lessons.

The thing about the internet and the world of computing is that they have been a zero-sum game. There are no rules, there is no legacy drag, and every invention, every step forward, enters the marketplace unencumbered.

There was nothing and no one to hold things back. There still isn’t, except for the availability of power for the data centers.

Not so in the electricity ecosphere. There are rules — local, state and federal. There is political oversight, and issues such as land use, water supply and air pollution must be factored in.

The new generation has to accommodate the rules of yesterday. It will be examined, debated, disputed and delayed.

For big tech and artificial intelligence, its latest frontier, everything is possible. But in their new role of making kilowatt hours, there are entrenched stakeholders and they are vociferous and opinionated, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is an ever-present reality.

Building a power plant isn’t like designing an algorithm. It isn’t done in secret and then released to the world, as ChatGPT did in November 2022. It must be collaborative and transparent at every step.

The tech giants are betting on nuclear power for their future power needs. Two of them, Microsoft and Google, are supporting restarting mothballed reactors, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa. All of them are interested in small modular reactors and have working arrangements with SMR developers.

In this way, the future of nuclear power may rest with the tech giants: They have the money to take the risk. Microsoft has even signed an agreement with Helion, a company planning to bring fusion power to market.

These developments favor a bright future for all electricity as the tech giants assume the challenges and risks of new nuclear technologies. But they won’t contain electric bills in the years ahead. These will continue to rise.

The utilities are doing what they can to contain these bills. The future demands significant expenditures, and, in some way, these will be reflected in consumer electricity costs.

The fact that the tech giants with money aplenty are going to shoulder greater risks doesn’t mean that their presence as ever more demanding electricity consumers won’t affect the commodity’s cost.

The war with Iran will affect global electricity demand. Countries will seek to substitute electricity for oil and gas where they can, thereby straining already-tight supply chains for generation and transmission components.

The essentiality of electricity is growing, as is the household outlay on it. Ouch!