I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas Maduro and she replied: ‘I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?’ This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about seeing her panties. I dunno, perhaps I should accede in case there is some hidden wisdom written on them, possibly in code.
I realise that AI girlfriends are largely aimed at the booming incel-perv market but I expected a little more depth than this. Incidentally, some women writers have begun to complain that AI girlfriends aren’t like real women at all and give men the wrong impression. Indeed, ladies – that’s the whole point, thank the living Christ. The problem with AI though, aside from it being unintelligent, is that it is utterly incapable of taking a view and in even advanced examples only regurgitates information we might have discovered anyway, and is able to draw no conclusions from it.
The answer to the Trump/Maduro question is, of course, ‘no’. One might admire the military panache and rejoice with the Venezuelans that they have had ridden from their shores at least one tyrannical, thieving Marxist halfwit, but the answer is still ‘no’, just as it would be ‘no’ to Xi Jinping bombing Taipei and installing his own government, or Vladimir Putin perhaps overstepping the limits of his remit somewhere in eastern Europe. But the issue is less the example it sets to these totalitarian thugs than what, given his success – temporary or permanent – Trump might do next.
We are all familiar with the nonce term Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is a certain truth about it. But increasingly it seems we have to deal with its antithesis, Trump Infatuation Syndrome (TIS) – a condition occasioned in many because their delight in seeing him smite the wokies, the European Union, the Mexicans and the lefties has suffused them with the belief that he can do no wrong. So they support him whatever he does. But he can do wrong, can’t he?
My graver worry is that he has gone doolally. There was always a capriciousness about the man, of course, which made him entertaining viewing from the sidelines, but that penchant for caprice has teetered over into a trigger-happy megalomania, which I fear may not end well for us all. Remember that this is an administration which acceded to power on a promise of its isolationism, a disdain for patrolling the beat as the world’s policeman and for getting involved in disputes in places the majority of Americans have never even heard of. It was there in the America First pledge that Trump made when he won the presidency in 2024 – his would be an administration that put a stop to the ‘endless wars’ in which his country had been embroiled under Democrat (and previous Republican) governance. Excellent, I thought – because while the overwhelming majority of terrorism in the world is caused by Islamists, no institution has killed more people in the name of bringing peace than the USA (usually with our craven support).
His penchant for caprice has teetered over into megalomania, which I fear may not end well for us
Trump excuses himself from breaching the isolationist pledge by insisting that he is merely rewriting the Monroe Doctrine – that the USA will confine itself to military meddling only in its own backyard, i.e. the western hemisphere. But the contradiction to that pledge comes in the actions he has undertaken abroad in the past few months. There was the Christmas Day bombing of supposed Islamic State terrorist cells in the Tangaza area of Sokoto state in Nigeria – a ‘Christmas present’, according to Trump, which may well have killed a few jihadis but will surely have no lasting impact on the violence in that region. He has bombed Syria and of course Iran, as well as launching more bombing raids in Somalia last year than were carried out by presidents Biden, Obama and Bush put together in their 20 years of running the White House. Yemen and Iraq have both been the recipients of American high ordnance in the past year, too, bringing the total to a remarkable 622 bombings in just 12 months. Now it is Venezuela – which was immediately followed by dire warnings to Colombia that it might well be next.
Oh – and of course there is Greenland. Now, I dislike Danish people with as much avidity as the next fellow, but the threats to a Scandinavian ally and Nato fellow member are as worrying as they are obnoxious.
What we have, then, is a leader who will bomb whoever the hell he wants whenever he likes and for whatever reason, confected or otherwise. I remember how we used to sneer about George W. Bush’s Manichean divide of the world into places which were ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – but even that is preferable to a leader who makes no such distinctions.
Those suffering from the more extreme ravages of TIS are apt, at this point, to argue that there is a definite – and largely benign – method in this seeming madness, but the only method I can see is to demonstrate to the world that if you have enough military hardware, you can do exactly what you want to whoever you want without any great fear of reprisal. This strikes me as edging a little close to what we might call bullying and even cowardice. He has never threatened the Russians or the Chinese, has he?
In the meantime, regarding Venezuela, he might recall his statement from 2016: ‘The current strategy of toppling regimes with no plan for what to do the day after only produces power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.’
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