President Trump is such an awful human being that just writing about him feels degrading. What president would denigrate his predecessor in front of China’s leader the way Trump mocked Joe Biden, now suffering from cancer, by pointing out that a framed picture of an autopen was hanging in the White House instead of Biden’s portrait?
Alas, though, when someone as morally warped as Trump — whose first secretary of state called him a “moron” — assumes this much unchecked power at the dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he can’t be ignored. Because right now Trump is leaving America exposed to dangerous viruses: digital, biological and diplomatic. Something bad is going to happen to us as a result. We and our children are going to pay for this, and not only at the gas pump.
Let me start with the digital virus now on the loose. Recently, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google all disclosed incidents in which their artificial intelligence models escaped their controls and gallivanted about hacking other computer systems — including an Australian government website, the Hugging Face platform and websites of the U.S. Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Remember, these are infant A.I. systems; they’re still in diapers and yet to be supercharged by fully training themselves and leaving their human designers behind.
And remember, too, the stories above are about what the good guys are doing. Talk to any major cyberprotection expert at any major U.S. company, and you’ll be terrified by stories about what the bad guys are doing with smaller A.I. models that they have gotten their hands on, with the controls stripped out.
The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report said attacks by “A.I.-enabled adversaries” increased by 89 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year, Infosecurity Magazine reported in February — and the rate has soared since.
But fear not, because our president, who doesn’t even use email, told the United Nations last week that he knows that our fears about A.I. safety are fraudulent. He referred to “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming.” He added: “And nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that A.I. is going to kill us all.” (Untold thousands have died in catastrophes worsened by climate change in the last decade, and only in Trump’s fetid imagination did anyone say, “Sir, we’ll all be dead in 12 years.”)
Trump and his party — and the A.I. tech bros who have effectively paid them to keep their hands off their industry — had better pray that the “October surprise” in this coming midterm election is not a major, destructive A.I. event. If it is, they’d better have their spaceships ready to whisk them off to another planet where they can live forever, because this one may make their existences a living hell.
This A.I. threat is not a hoax (nor is the climate threat a hoax, as Trump would know if he ever looked at his own administration’s NASA website). The only hoax is that Trump, who once suggested injecting bleach might be a good way to rid yourself of Covid-19, thinks he knows anything about A.I. or climate change — or bleach.
“It’s not a hoax at all,” Bill Gates said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Gates said that the United States should restrain A.I. development until tougher safeguards are in place, and he argued that China would most likely do the same if Washington took the initiative to draft new rules to regulate the use of A.I.
A.I. without proper regulation is “completely irresponsible,” Gates said. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like.” He concluded: “A.I. is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.”
Precisely because there has never been such a tool, despite its destructive potential, with so much promise to solve so many energy, climate and medical problems for humanity, I want to see A.I. thrive, as does Gates. Which is why we should all want to prevent now an A.I.-driven Sept. 11 that would completely delegitimize artificial intelligence in the public eye. That would be a double tragedy.
I wish that the only threat to us from Trump’s unrestrained ignorance were an A.I. virus. Sadly, last week, my Times colleague Apoorva Mandavilli reported that America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, long the “undisputed global leader in public health,” has been so systematically dismantled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that it is now “a skeleton of the powerhouse it was.”
Not only has the C.D.C.’s staff been reduced by some 30 percent, but, Mandavilli reported, citing current and former employees, “the changes have hindered the C.D.C.’s ability to respond to outbreaks as measles spreads at home and Ebola abroad, and to issue timely guidance on vaccinations as cooling temperatures kick off the respiratory season. … Entire divisions have been shuttered, including teams that worked on smoking, sexual violence, child abuse and falls among older adults.”
The Guardian newspaper carried a story about the spreading outbreak of measles in Pennsylvania, which has now topped 900 cases. Dr. John Goldman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said that between 1992 and 2026, he hadn’t seen a single case, The Guardian reported. Now, “We’re seeing at least one every day,” and he added, “Never in my life did I think I was ever going to see measles again.” This is an example of how Trump’s negligence is helping to spread actual, biological viruses.
But don’t forget the anti-diplomatic virus also sapping our strength. What is that? Check out this story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, by its Middle East affairs expert Zvi Bar’el. It was about how the diplomatic incompetence of the Trump administration and the malevolence of the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have combined to grind the 20-point Trump peace plan for Gaza to a halt. So Gazan civilians, many living in war-broken buildings, one of which collapsed on Sept. 16, killing at least 21 people, including 11 children, remain in total squalor.
When Trump launched his vaunted Gaza Board of Peace and made himself chairman, participating countries pledged $17 billion for Gaza. But “as far as is known, less than $300 million has been transferred,” Bar’el reported.
Moreover, the peace plan’s international stabilization force has yet to be established. The Palestinian police force to replace Hamas, which is supposed to operate under a Palestinian technocratic government, was supposed to receive training in Egypt, “but Israel is preventing them from leaving Gaza,” according to Bar’el.
Then Bar’el peeled back the real story: “The stalemate in Gaza serves Israel. Hamas no longer poses a security threat, but as long as it holds territory, Israel retains a pretext for resuming the war. And as long as the Strip remains devastated and unlivable, the pressure on the people to leave only grows.” He added that Netanyahu’s defense minister, Israel Katz, after being criticized by a rival politician for not achieving a more decisive victory over Hamas, declared that the Israeli military was ready, if ordered, to eliminate Hamas “so that the emigration plan can be implemented.”
So that the emigration plan can be implemented.
Really? What is that? That is Orwellian speak for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza of Palestinians by the Netanyahu government. And what have Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in response? Zilch.
I’ve learned over the years that diplomacy operates like a virus as well, beneficially or detrimentally: The more success you have, the more respect you get; the more respect you get, the more success you have. Conversely, the more failure you have, the less allies trust joining you, so the more failure you have.
Example: Between March and October 1991, Secretary of State James A. Baker III made eight diplomatic trips to the Middle East to put together the Madrid peace conference — the first among Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization and several Arab states. I made all eight trips with him as The Times’s diplomatic correspondent. He failed on the first seven, but Baker would not quit and he got it done on the eighth.
Show me a single diplomatic initiative the Trump administration has built since the cease-fire in Gaza, which Trump has left to languish. It’s as if all he cared about was the headline from the signing, after which he amazingly declared last Oct. 13: “Together, we’ve achieved what everybody said was impossible. At long last we have peace in the Middle East.”
Now that’s what I call a real hoax.
There is no energetic, focused follow-up because there are no clear lines of authority. You have Thomas Barrack, who is the special envoy for Syria and Iraq and the ambassador to Turkey, making his own policy statements. You have Massad Fares Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, serving as a senior adviser to the president of the United States on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. You have part-timers, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. You have various assistant secretaries of state and defense. And you have Trump on his social media feed. (Somebody is going to make this into a musical!)
What you don’t have is a secretary of state like Baker, relentlessly focusing and leveraging American power and making trip after trip after trip until he gets the job done.
The only thing Trump relentlessly follows up on is harassing the press. Last Saturday, after being forced by a judge to allow CNN reporters back in the White House after Trump illegally banned them because their coverage was not fawning enough, the president nevertheless blocked CNN from accompanying him on Air Force One to attend a football game in Tennessee.
When it comes to denouncing the press, Trump is laser-focused. But when dealing with the digital, biological and diplomatic viruses weakening our national immune system, not so much — to our great peril.
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