President Donald Trump signed an executive order replacing the term "artificial" with "super" in references to intelligence, a move that redefines a key political issue as the November midterms approach. The order follows the president's characterization of concerns about artificial intelligence as a "hoax" and aligns with his broader strategy to dictate the vocabulary of political debates. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle stated in a statement to Axios that Trump is the "unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party" and is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress.
The linguistic shift extends beyond technology. Trump has dismissed the term "affordability" as a "fake word" and a Democratic "con job," though he has not proposed a specific alternative. He has also varied his description of the conflict in Iran, using terms such as "war," "excursion," "military operation," and "skirmish." Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who previously led its Annenberg Public Policy Center, told Axios that if influencers adopt a specific language, they gain a "very powerful capacity." She noted that attaching positive affect to "super intelligence" instead of negative affect to "AI" accomplishes something significant in the current news environment.
Reactions to the terminology change have been mixed. Elon Musk said he would rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. Sam Altman told Politico he would not rename OpenAI, noting that "brands are sticky." Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, wrote to Axios that shaping which words are used and how they are defined allows one to win the debate before it starts. She added that Trump has been successful in redefining issues, pointing to his popularization of "fake news," and that such frame warfare is essential to how politics works today.
This effort to control language is part of a broader expansion by Trump's second administration. The administration has renamed the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and the Department of Defense. Keywords tied to diversity and gender have driven grant cancellations. Jamieson described this as adding a controversial function to the presidency: that of "namer-in-chief." The central question for November is whether these shifts in perception can influence election outcomes.