I suddenly got the idea yesterday to ask Microsoft’s Copilot AI function, which constantly begs me to use it, “Write two paragraphs in the style of William Faulkner summarizing the confused thinking of President Donald Trump during his second Presidential term.”
I like much of it: “He thought in pronouncements, loops of certainty that defied chronology, that bent history backward to resemble a mirror held not for reflection but for reassurance, a flash of self made myth.
And so in those hallways half-lit by flickering screens and advisors grown weary not from battle but from translating impulse into governance, he persisted—speech a slurry of conviction and contradiction, of tweets and treaties tangled like weeds around the solemn pillars of precedent. Time did not move forward for him, it circled—a carousel of enemies fabricated and emboldened, allies praised and dismissed, loyalty a currency whose inflation matched the rhetoric, unanchored and shifting, while beneath it all beat that unyielding need, not for legacy but for immediacy, for spectacle, for the applause that washed away doubt like rain off marbled stone. His thoughts did not progress but revolved, a constellation where he was both axis and observer, bewildered by the stars but naming them nonetheless.”
I like much of it: “He thought in pronouncements, loops of certainty that defied chronology, that bent history backward to resemble a mirror held not for reflection but for reassurance, a flash of self made myth.
And so in those hallways half-lit by flickering screens and advisors grown weary not from battle but from translating impulse into governance, he persisted—speech a slurry of conviction and contradiction, of tweets and treaties tangled like weeds around the solemn pillars of precedent. Time did not move forward for him, it circled—a carousel of enemies fabricated and emboldened, allies praised and dismissed, loyalty a currency whose inflation matched the rhetoric, unanchored and shifting, while beneath it all beat that unyielding need, not for legacy but for immediacy, for spectacle, for the applause that washed away doubt like rain off marbled stone. His thoughts did not progress but revolved, a constellation where he was both axis and observer, bewildered by the stars but naming them nonetheless.”
Sounds right to me.