Donald Trump builds with one hand and breaks with the other, this new old president who wants to own tomorrow. The opposing lawyers noticed the breaks first. They always do.
Something wasn't right in the torrent of executive orders Trump signed after taking office again. The words didn't fit together like legal language should. Every lawyer knows about borrowed language—the carefully gathered templates from Lexis, the trusted paragraphs containing state or federal standards for matters like summary judgment passed down through law firms like family recipes. Even the greenest associate knows you read what you borrow. You check the cases, update the citations, make sure the words still mean what they meant when someone first wrote them down. But these orders stumbled and repeated themselves, like homework copied without being read.
Five hundred billion dollars says Trump understands the future better than his words suggest. That's what he announced for Stargate, the new venture with Oracle and OpenAI and SoftBank. Smart money, that kind of money. The kind that knows where tomorrow lives.
But those executive orders tell a different story. The lawyers picked them apart. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate found the numbers that kept resetting to one, as if the machine forgot how to count past the first item. Lawyer Raffi Melkonian spotted language about the Gulf of Mexico/America that read like a child's report, all facts sandwiched in neat rows without understanding why they matter.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison stood next to Trump in the White House, talking about why it matters that these data centers are rising in Texas. OpenAI’s Sam Altman spoke about curing diseases. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son brought his enormous checkbook, the same one that ensures the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks are always contenders in NPB. They all see the ideal future—American-made artificial intelligence, built with American money and know-how on American soil.
But someone on Trump's team couldn't wait for that future. They needed words now, needed them fast, needed them to fill the space between signing ceremonies. So they turned to the machines we already have, the ones that write like students cramming for a test they didn't study for.
The Gulf of Mexico is rebranded the Gulf of America in one of these orders. The machine that wrote about that change filled the page with facts about fish and tourism, like a realtor trying too hard to sell a house everyone already knows. It's the kind of writing that makes you wonder if anyone read it before they printed it. They didn’t, of course. That’s the less talked-about part of the AI value proposition. Not only do I not have to write it, I don’t have to read it, either. Why would I? It’s slop.
Legal documents used to be built like stone walls, each word carefully placed, each comma weighed like gold. Even when lawyers borrowed—and they always borrowed, from the standard paragraphs found in every bench brief to the time-tested language for contracts—they at least skimmed what they took. When it really counted, they'd spend hours shifting semicolons around, knowing each mark could change how millions lived their lives. The old firms kept their best language in books thick as dictionaries, pages worn smooth by associates checking and double-checking before they copied a single word. Now the words come out like assembly line products, fast and cheap and passing unseen without so much as the flutter of an eyelid.
Trump knows about building things. He built a few towers that changed skylines. Now he wants to help build the machines that will change everything else. Five hundred billion dollars says he's serious, and understandably so. But those executive orders say something else—that he's fine with letting barely-competent machines write his executive orders without anyone checking what they wrote. It's like building Trump Tower in Manhattan while living in a prefab house you never bothered to inspect.
The lawyers will keep finding more problems. Weird formatting, random bold marks showing up like weeds in a garden. Grammar that wouldn't pass a high school English class. And although the executive orders are executed when signed regardless of who or what authors them, some are bound to contain the kind of mistakes that could tangle up the government in court battles for years. The executive order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship (jus soli) of the sort that dates back to United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 is certainly one of those (interestingly, the great Plessy v. Ferguson civil rights dissenter John Marshall Harlan dissented here too, siding with Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s interesting jus sanguinis dissent).
Oracle's building the data centers in Texas as you read this. They'll be filled with machines smarter than the ones that wrote these orders. That's the promise, anyway. Take my word as a historian, though: the future's always better in the future.
In the here and now, we've got these AI-penned orders, these strangely-worded commands that’ll shape how people live. They read like they were written by a poorly-tuned machine trying to sound human, or a poorly-tuned human trying to sound smart, or both at once.
Trump stands there with the tech giants and money men, talking about American jobs and American power. Behind him, the wheels of government grind on, mass producing documents of tomorrow that come off like some lazy undergraduate’s first draft of last night.
Five hundred billion dollars says Trump knows where technology is going. His job, as he sees it, is building the next version, the better version, the America First version. He's betting billions on this smart gamble. But today's work still needs half-assing, and I suppose the worst versions of tomorrow's tools are all we have, ready or not. The quality suffers, but a lack of quality has never stopped him before.
That's the double game he's playing—constructing the future while using its unfinished pieces to speed up things like the repair of cracks in the foundation. Some media hot-take artists would call it hypocrisy. He'd probably call it smart business. Either way, his words keep coming out strange, and the money keeps getting bigger. Same as it ever was.