Donald Trump has repeatedly cast artificial intelligence (AI) as central to securing U.S. dominance over rival nations. Headlines such as Melania Trump’s declaration that “the robots are here” illustrate how AI functions not only as a technological advance but as a symbolic frontier of American power. Drawing on Judith Butler’s performativity theory [1988] and Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power [1960], this paper argues that Trump enacts a presidential masculinity that fuses technological command with exclusionary nationalism. Through analysis of Trump’s speeches and media coverage, I show how his evocation of an AI “race” recalls Kennedy’s New Frontier and the Cold War space race, projecting both nostalgia and competitive urgency. Literary fiction provides a crucial lens for understanding this performance. Nicholas Gaskill has noted how novelists respond to Trump through “panic fiction,” staging his persona as both threat and symptom of broader cultural anxieties. Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 [2017] and Don DeLillo’s The Silence [2020] illuminate how Trump’s rhetoric of AI as an existential threat is bound to apocalyptic fantasies of survival, technological transcendence, and the fragility of American exceptionalism. Their novels treat Trumpism as a fiction in itself – an unstable blend of performance, myth, and fear that refracts the ways AI is bound to presidential authority. While Trump invokes the positive mythology of past presidents, I will argue that these novels reveal how such nostalgia is inseparable from anxieties of national decline.

Authors:
Lucy Stevens, University of Brighton, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Lucy Stevens is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, UK researching depictions of U.S. presidents in the Manhattan novel. This study combines literature, political science, and sociology in an interdisciplinary framework.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-stevens-ab1274264

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