This article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings here. To submit a question to next week’s Friday Mailbag, email onthetrail@deseretnews.com.
Hello, friends. A year ago this week, I was following Republican candidates’ short-lived campaigns around the Iowa State Fair. This year, the fair’s main draw is ... something else.
3 things to know
- Vice President Kamala Harris completed a five-day swing through battleground states last week, introducing voters to the new-look Democratic ticket. But voters are still left in the dark on much of Harris’ policy platform, which is absent from her website and spoken of only broadly during rallies. Harris says she plans to unveil some of her economic platform this week. Read more here.
- Iran hacked the Trump campaign’s internal communications, former President Donald Trump said Saturday. Several news outlets claimed they had received anonymous emails containing internal Trump campaign information, including a dossier vetting Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee. The Washington Post reported Monday that Iran also targeted Biden and Harris advisers. Read more here.
- The flow of fentanyl into the U.S. has become a centerpiece of Trump’s attacks on the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies. My colleague Hanna Seariac has some great reporting on the impact fentanyl is having on rural communities in the West. It’s a “money-driven business,” Seariac reports, with no simple solutions. Read more here.
The big idea
We’ve lost the plot
On Friday, moments before Harris’ rally in Phoenix started, I snapped a picture with my iPhone. I posted it to X with an observation: of the dozens of campaign rallies I’d covered over the past year, I wrote, this was the biggest.
Before long, my mentions were full of people leveling an odd accusation: the picture I’d uploaded, they claimed, was generated by artificial intelligence.
I’ve been accused of spreading falsehoods before, as many journalists have. In situations where I’ve made factual errors, I’ve corrected it as quickly and clearly as possible. But this was new territory for me. As the image got passed around social media, more and more people asserted that it wasn’t the product of my phone, but of generative AI.
Multiple people uploaded screenshots from a website called “AI image detector,” which allows users to upload an image and see “the likelihood of AI and human creation.” The website claimed that the relatively benign image I’d captured on my phone minutes earlier actually had a 90% likelihood of being generated by AI.
By Sunday afternoon, the debate over AI was leading the news cycle. Trump claimed on social media that images and videos of a Harris events — particularly, a Wednesday event at an airport hangar in Detroit — were fake. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DON’T EXIST!”
I’ve written before about the role of AI in the 2024 election. We’ve seen past instances of AI-generated “deepfakes,” like radio ads mimicking Republican candidates’ voices and robocalls copying Biden’s voice. Trump’s claims here are different — instead of calling out something fake for posing as real, he accused something real of being fake.
“You’ve now got the possibility to blame something or attribute something to AI, as a way to kind of dismiss it or avoid accountability, if it’s something that puts you in a bad light,” said Chris McIsaac, a resident fellow in governance at the R Street Institute.
But AI is only part of the problem here — and may be a symptom of a larger issue. “I think it’s a good example of the general distrust in the information environment,” McIsaac told me Monday.
Artificial intelligence can exacerbate that distrust, and bad actors can drive it further. The heart of the issue, though, is a lack of faith in American institutions. Americans, in the aggregate, no longer trust the government, the media or our electoral system. Most Americans say made-up news or information plays a big role in decreasing that trust. A majority find it difficult to know what is true when listening to elected officials. And plenty of people, it seems, struggle to know if a photo of a political rally is real when taken by a journalist.
Has the media brought some of this demise upon ourselves? Certainly. But the cratering trust in our industry is not exclusive to us. Just about every major U.S. institution, except for the police and the Postal Service, is dealing with a crisis in confidence.
So, here we are: less than three months ahead of an election that both sides claim is existential to democracy, and the leading candidates are not sparring over policy, but over facts. That is a crisis of trust.
How do we get out of this moment? McIsaac noted that this distrust could affect how and whether Americans vote at all. Election officials across the country are working to fight misinformation and to regain trust as the source of election-related information. The National Association of Secretaries of State launched an information campaign to promote clear messaging on how to vote. Individual election officials across the country have attempted to bat down election misinformation.
“They’ve been being very proactive this election cycle to try and kind of solidify their position as the trusted source of reputable election information, particularly as it relates to questions of when and where to vote,” McIsaac said.
A similar impetus falls on the candidates — and the media — to promote verifiable facts over falsehood.
What I’m reading
Billionaire tech bros for Trump? If one were to look only at the most outspoken of the class — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg — it would appear that Silicon Valley is moving right. Monday night’s Musk-Trump livestream seemed to speed that up. But this WSJ column encourages some brake-pumping: “The monster money men may be flirting with support for Mr. Trump, but the rank and file have a long way to go.” Is Silicon Valley Turning Right? (Andy Kessler, The Wall Street Journal)
Has Trump mellowed since his assassination attempt? According to attendees at a recent fundraiser, Trump is upset that some suggest he is. “I’m not nicer,” Trump said, according to one person in attendance. And it doesn’t appear he plans to change, even as the campaign has shifted: no longer is it Trump versus “an 81-year-old incumbent who struggled to navigate stairs, thoughts and sentences.” Instead, it’s Trump versus “a Black woman nearly 20 years younger, one who has already made history and who is drawing large and excited crowds.” Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign (Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, The New York Times)
Trump first proposed eliminating taxes on tips for restaurant workers. Harris seemed to like the idea enough to throw her support behind it, too, mentioning it during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. It’s red meat for Nevada voters, where the hospitality industry (and the culinary union) dominate the economy (and elections). Sure enough, minutes after Harris’ speech, the culinary union endorsed Harris. Makes one wonder: how many more battleground-specific policy pitches will we hear between now and Election Day? Is it time to deregulate raw Wisconsin milk? Harris says she supports eliminating taxes on tips, like Trump (Jeff Mason, Reuters)
See you on the trail.
Editor’s Note: The Deseret News is committed to covering issues of substance in the 2024 presidential race from its unique perspective and editorial values. Our team of political reporters will bring you in-depth coverage of the most relevant news and information to help you make an informed decision. Find our complete coverage of the election here.