Not to put Descartes before the horse, but this is getting out of control

The corpse of the magazine known as Newsweek published an op-ed today, “by” somebody named Melik Abdul. Here’s his bio:

A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Project 21 member Melik Abdul has been an “East of the River” resident of Washington, D.C. for close to 20 years. After several years of working on political campaigns, he began consulting with conservative groups to help them build out their communication and policy infrastructure. He also advises federal, state and local leaders, as well as political candidates, on communication and minority engagement strategies.

He is a regular political commentator on networks including the Fox News Channel, One America News, the Black News Channel and HILL TV. He can also be found in print, on radio and on local television.

First appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004, Melik worked in the federal government for well over a decade in various public affairs and congressional liaison roles.

Melik earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of the District of Columbia.

Here’s a chunk of the op-ed:

Watching him hand the nation’s spy agencies to Bill Pulte this week, a housing official with no intelligence background, I keep landing on a harder question: What’s left of Trump’s legacy if he’s willing to burn it all down?

That’s the part getting lost. Trump wasn’t elected only to win. He was elected on the promise that a working-class, multiracial coalition could outlast him and remake the Republican Party for good.

That ambition wasn’t far-fetched. Trump is the first generational figure our party has produced since Ronald Reagan—the first Republican in 40 years with the standing to redefine what the party is, not merely win an election. Reagan did exactly that, and the movement he built outlasted him by a generation. The opening is real. What Trump does with it is the whole question.

Right now, that promise is being tested. The early returns aren’t encouraging.

The trouble isn’t that the base has soured. It hasn’t. The trouble is that the administration has turned inward, chasing fights that thrill the faithful but build nothing durable. Renaming the Kennedy Center. A transgender service ban. Tariff brinkmanship. These play well with the people who were never going anywhere. They’ve done little for others in that 77 million Americans who actually put Trump back in office, most of whom don’t treat any of it as an existential crisis.

That’s the cost of governing by applause. You spend capital on symbols and end up with a second term carrying more asterisks than the first.

Look at how many of these fights end. A federal judge ordered Trump’s name stripped from the Kennedy Center, ruling that only Congress can rename it. An appeals court blocked the military’s transgender ban for current service members, with the majority calling the policy “both arbitrary and based upon animus.” Act on a shaky legal theory, watch a court throw it out, and the win turns into a headline about losing. Ashes don’t build anything.

Then there’s the self-inflicted damage.

Voter ID and proof of citizenship are genuinely popular ideas. But Trump turned the SAVE Act into a loyalty test he knew the Senate would never pass. There were never 60 votes, and no appetite to end the filibuster to find them. It was red meat. And it helped end John Cornyn’s career. Cornyn’s sin wasn’t disloyalty; he cosponsored the bill. His sin was not being MAGA enough, fast enough.

That’s the Cornyn effect: Trump trading the party’s interest for his own. He threw his weight behind Ken Paxton, a scandal-plagued attorney general, and Paxton won the nomination. Now, a Senate seat in a state Trump carried by 14 points is a race Democrats think they can win.

Here’s the strategic problem nobody in the inner circle wants to say out loud. Trump needs votes. He needs them for his agenda and for his nominations. And the senators he’s spent the past year humiliating—Cornyn, Cassidy, the outgoing members with nothing left to lose—are exactly the votes he’ll have to find. A lame-duck senator who’s been told he isn’t wanted owes the White House nothing. That isn’t loyalty. It’s leverage, and Trump just handed it away.

Pulte is the clearest tell. He built his name running a private equity firm focused on homebuilding and a Detroit nonprofit that demolished blighted homes—and, lately, mining mortgage records to go after the president’s enemies. That might qualify him to run a housing agency. It says nothing about the judgment required to oversee the intelligence community and the President’s Daily Brief. He fit an ideological mold. That was the qualification.

This is the deeper risk. Movements built entirely around one man don’t survive him.

And so on.

Based on a hunch, I ran the entire text through three different AI detectors, and all three agreed with a high degree of confidence that the entire text — all 958 words — was AI-generated.

Ok it’s only Newsweek, and needless to say this is just political hackwork of the purest kind, but even so this is somebody who more or less writes for a living, and he’s throwing a piece of putatively original writing out there that’s completely, as in every single word, written by a computer program, and then sticking his name on it as its author.

On a mordantly amusing note, the editorial line at the end of the piece is The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

Also too, Newsweek’s AI policy is in relevant part:

If AI-powered tools have been used at all in the production or editing of an article, it will be disclosed at the bottom of the article.

It’s hard to overstate how out of control this stuff has become, and all in the course of about three years. I don’t have a lot to say about this at the moment beyond noting what’s happening, but what’s happening is very disturbing on a bunch of different levels.