Field Notes: July 18, 2026
Trump lays the groundwork for electoral chaos | A dystopian AI tribunal goes bust after blowback
Welcome to Field Notes, a roundup of readings to help you find your way through our polluted information environment, along with some “offline” commentary—what’s going on in my garden, my kitchen, my life off screen.
Online Notes
A few pieces of news and analysis from the past week
We Should View Trump’s Speech as Preparation for Election Interference
This week, I was happy to contribute a piece to MSNOW’s Opinion Page about President Trump’s desperate, conspiratorial speech this week.
In order to distract from his flagging poll numbers, high gas prices, and the ICE killings that for some reason keep happening, Trump scheduled a primetime address, returning to
a favorite topic: conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. The president made sweeping claims about a broad Chinese campaign to access voter records, agitate against his candidacy and interfere in the election. But the claims are not borne out by the evidence, including the intelligence documents he declassified as “proof.” The speech was a desperate attempt to undermine confidence in our democratic system and lay the groundwork for an unprecedented and illegal attempt to control elections from the White House itself.
In the piece, I provide some context about elections. Trump’s misleading claim that China has access to 200 million Americans’ voter information, for instance, is a lot less alarming when you realize this information is either public or available for purchase on the open internet. I also discuss the background of the documents that Trump declassified:
[They] don’t show some conspiracy by the intelligence community to hide information from the president. They show intelligence professionals doing their jobs: assessing sources, debating the reliability of reports and making judgment calls about when it is necessary to publicly sound an alarm. Disagreement is not a sign of a cover-up, as the president alleged, but a hallmark of intelligence professionals doing their jobs. Disclosing every detected foreign influence campaign, no matter how minor, would risk seriously undermining the American people’s confidence in our elections — exactly as the president did this week.
The documents do, however, leave unredacted the names of two since-fired intel officials that Trump believes were involved in the “suppression” of intelligence about Chinese influence campaigns against him. The documents show these officials recalled two reports because of flimsy sourcing (one source hadn’t provided confirmed information in over a year; the other was a secondhand source). Leaving these names unredacted isn’t an accident. The Trump administration knows exactly what follows: online and offline harassment and threats.
We Don’t Need an AI Court or AI Journalist Rankings
While in the car this week, I heard an interview on NPR’s Here and Now with journalist Gary Baum, who became the first target of a bizarre, Peter-Thiel-backed AI startup called “Objection AI.” In reporting about the experience, Baum explains:
“Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup — fittingly called Objection — to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I’d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier.
Livingston, a young staffer who describes his job on LinkedIn as, simply, “creating shareholder value,” noted that an AI tribunal would attempt to “adjudicate a determination of truth,” and that the announced outcome “will also affect your Honor Index score, a measure of the veracity of your published work.” He went on, adding, “You can argue your side by uploading your evidence and suggesting your interpretation of the allegation.”
What dystopian nightmare is this? AI is regularly hallucinating in and out of the legal world, but some people are so high on their own supply they think it can serve as a neutral and truthful adjudicator Baum’s reporting, which is worth reading in full, seems to have convinced the leaders of “Objection” it was a bad idea; it is now an AI-powered journalist-ranking site. To be clear, we don’t need that either.
Offline Notes
The real-life pastimes, products, and programs getting me through the infopocalypse.
I was in New York this week, and got to spend time with lovely friends and colleagues like Julie Roginsky and Michelle Kinney of the Mayday Network (have you listened to our Americans rewatch podcast, The Illegals?) and Elmira Bayrasli. I also ate pizza.
Kaylee, our pup, seems to be getting bigger every day. I sent in a doggie DNA test for her last week and can’t wait to see what breeds other than lab are contributing to her extreme cuteness.
I’ve been spending more time on Instagram, spending a lot of time making more vertical videos and post more analysis on that platform, only to see middling growth. Are you on Instagram? Do you follow me there?
Hope you enjoy your weekend—I’ll be back in your inbox early next week. 🧭