President Trump is such an awful human being that just writing about him feels degrading. What president would denigrate his predecessor in front of China’s leader the way Trump mocked Joe Biden, now suffering from cancer? Alas, though, when someone as morally warped as Trump — whose first secretary of state called him a “moron” — assumes this much unchecked power at the dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he can’t be ignored. Because right now Trump is leaving America exposed to dangerous viruses: digital, biological and diplomatic. Something bad is going to happen to us as a result.

Let me start with the digital virus now on the loose. Recently, Open AI, Anthropic, Meta and Google all disclosed incidents in which their artificial intelligence models escaped their controls and gallivanted about hacking other computer systems — including an Australian government website, the Hugging Face platform and websites of the U.S. Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Crowd Strike Global Threat Report said attacks by “A.I.-enabled adversaries” increased by 89 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year.

But fear not, because our president, who doesn’t even use email, told the United Nations last week that he knows that our fears about A.I. safety are fraudulent. He referred to “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming.” He added: “And nobody was dead.” Trump and his party — and the A.I. tech bros who have effectively paid them to keep their hands off their industry — had better pray that the “October surprise” in this coming midterm election is not a major, destructive A.I. event.

“It’s not a hoax at all,” Bill Gates said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Gates said that the United States should restrain A.I. development until tougher safeguards are in place. A.I. without proper regulation is “completely irresponsible,” Gates said. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like.” He concluded: “A.I. is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.”