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The Preemptive Republican Surrender to Trump

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 04 › trump-2024-election-republican-primary-nomination-opponents › 673882

Donald Trump inspires an uncommon devotion among his most ardent followers, which can obscure a surprising fact about his present political position: Many, if not most, Republicans do not want him to be their party’s next nominee for president. As of today, according to the polling averages of both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, Trump has consolidated only half of the Republican primary vote, with the rest split among Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and a handful of other alternatives. The numbers suggest that despite the former president’s best efforts, half of his own party’s voters want to move on. What they can’t agree on is who should displace Trump as their standard-bearer.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2016, Trump was repeatedly outpolled by the field of Republican candidates, and hovered around 35 percent on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in February, which he then lost to Senator Ted Cruz. But as the campaign wore on, Trump’s devoted following of a third of GOP primary voters was enough to propel him to victory over a divided group of opponents. He was greatly helped by their tactics—or lack thereof. Instead of attacking Trump as the front-runner, his rivals assailed one another, hoping that Trump would collapse of his own accord and they would inherit his supporters. Rather than consolidate behind a single alternative to Trump, the other contenders fought onward in state after state. This infighting enabled Trump to scoop up the most delegates, even though he never won a state with more than 50 percent of the vote until New York’s primary, on April 19. Soon, Trump’s opponents were out of money and he was the presumptive nominee.

The primary worked out poorly for the GOP establishment and its professional politicians, who found themselves on the losing end of a hostile takeover by an outsider. Yet in the run-up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party looks set to repeat this pattern, with Trump cruising to renomination amid a splintered field. The question is why.

A week ago, conservatives gathered at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff, a prelude to the presidential campaign. For Trump’s challengers, the event offered the opportunity to introduce themselves to an influential electorate and explain why they should succeed the former president as the Republican nominee. But that is not exactly what happened. “The candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch,” The New York Times reported. “Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better-known, better-funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out—or at least take down—Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.” Indeed, the only candidate who drew any fire at all was DeSantis, who did not attend the gathering, and ended up serving less as an alternative to Trump than as his human shield.

Trump enters the 2024 campaign with an array of new vulnerabilities that could be readily exploited by an ambitious opponent eager to appeal to the Republican primary electorate. You got rolled by Dr. Fauci and locked down the country, then lost to a doddering old man in an election you claimed was stolen but whose heist you proved powerless to prevent, they might say. Challengers like DeSantis might also point to national polls that show the Florida governor outperforming Trump in a matchup with President Joe Biden (who himself once rode an air of electability to the nomination). While you and your handpicked candidates in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania have been losing elections, I’ve been winning them by historic margins in Florida.

[Read: Just call Trump a loser]

So far, none of this has happened. The arguments may be there, but no one of consequence is making them. Instead, history seems poised to repeat, with Trump primed to win renomination against a divided field of opponents who refuse to take him on until it’s too late. This may appear baffling, but there are actually good reasons no challenger has been willing to take the fight to Trump.

To begin with, it’s easy to propose that Trump-skeptical Republicans should unite behind a single theoretical candidate. It’s a lot harder to find an actual candidate who can unite them. Ron DeSantis voters want something different than Nikki Haley voters, who want something different than voters for Senator Tim Scott. Back in 2020, the Democratic Party solved a similar problem by turning to Biden to defeat the surging socialist Bernie Sanders. But Biden was a popular former vice president whom most factions found acceptable, if not ideal. No candidate in today’s Republican Party has Biden’s broad shoulders and innocuous appeal.

Similarly, Biden’s success was made possible by his lock on a core constituency of the Democratic primary electorate: Black voters. He lost badly in the early primary states, but took 49 percent in South Carolina, buoyed by then–House Whip Jim Clyburn’s fulsome endorsement. In the 2024 Republican primary, only one candidate has the demonstrated devotion of a key constituency, and that’s Trump with his base.

This is also why tearing into Trump is such an imposing prospect. While it’s true that there are new lines of attack that might work on today’s Trump, whoever is the first to unleash them will likely bear the brunt of the backlash from his supporters. No candidate wants to be the first into the fray, because turning on Trump may doom their prospects, even if it opens up political space for others.

This is the reason Republican contenders have once again fallen back on the hope that Trump will collapse on his own, and that outside forces—the justice system, the media, even old age—will swoop in and take care of the former president for them. But Trump’s indictments won’t sway Republican primary voters who have already dismissed them, and the mainstream media’s critical coverage won’t persuade GOP loyalists who don’t read or trust it.

The hard truth that Republican challengers have yet to absorb is that if their strategy to beat Trump is to hope that someone else beats Trump for them, they are not serious alternatives to Trump. Likewise, expecting people outside the Republican Party to police the Republican Party is not a strategy; it’s a surrender. The only actors who have any chance of altering the primary’s trajectory are those with credibility in Republican politics, whether they are politicians or popular commentators. There’s no guarantee that taking on Trump will yield a different outcome, but refusing to do so guarantees him a glide path to the nomination.

The End of Recommendation Letters

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2023 › 04 › chatgpt-ai-college-professors › 673796

Early spring greened outside the picture window in the faculty club. I was lunching with a group of fellow professors, and, as happens these days when we assemble, generative artificial intelligence was discussed. Are your students using it? What are you doing to prevent cheating? Heads were shaken in chagrin as iced teas were sipped for comfort.

But then, one of my colleagues wondered: Could he use AI to generate a reference letter for a student? Faculty write loads of these every year, in support of applications for internships, fellowships, industry jobs, graduate school, university posts. They all tend to be more or less the same, yet they also somehow take a lot of time, and saving some of it might be nice. Other, similar ideas spilled out quickly. Maybe ChatGPT could help with grant proposals. Or syllabi, even? The ideas seemed revelatory, but also scandalous.

Scandalous because we faculty, like all faculty everywhere, were drawn into an educators’ panic about AI over the winter. When ChatGPT began to spread around the internet last December, fears of its impact gripped our profession: The college essay is dead! It’s the end of high-school English! Students will let computers do their homework! Task forces were launched to investigate. Syllabi were updated with academic-integrity warnings. Op-eds were written. And now, in the faculty club, we professors were musing over how to automate our own assignments?

Large language models can be pretty bad at generating accurate facts and knowledge. But they’re pretty darn good at creating plausible renditions of the work output you don’t care that much about. It is here, where exhaustion meets nuisance, that AI brings students and faculty together.

Take reference letters. ChatGPT can’t explain why you would (or wouldn’t) recommend a specific individual for a specific role, but it can give you a detailed template. A University of Texas professor I spoke with uses AI as a starting point for both lecture content and reference-letter writing. “Quite generic,” the faculty member reported, “but then the average letter is … ?” I’m withholding the faculty member’s name to protect this person from feared reprisal. A shortcut like this can easily be seen as shirking work, but with so much work to do, maybe something has to give. ChatGPT seemed to cut the time involved in writing letters by half.

“A dirty secret of academe is that most professors have a cache of letters separated into different categories,” says Matt Huculak, another AI-using academic and the head of advanced research services at the University of Victoria libraries. They’ll typically have folders full of excellent, good, and average ones, which can be adjusted and repurposed as appropriate. But Huculak wondered if AI might help break that chain, especially for top students. So he asked ChatGPT to write an “excellent” reference letter, and then, instead of using it as a template, he treated it as an enemy. He opened the ChatGPT output in one window and tried to compose the very opposite of what he saw: an anti-formulaic recommendation letter. “What I wrote ended up feeling like the most ‘human’ and heartfelt letter I’ve written in a long time,” he told me. The student won a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge.

[Read: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.]

Nothing was stopping Huculak from applying the same technique to one of his own formulaic letters, striving to produce its inverse. But having a machine “lay the genre bare,” as Huculak put it, somehow gave him the comfort to play around with the material. It also broke him of the terror of the blank page.

Stephanie Kane, who teaches at George Mason University, also told me that ChatGPT upends the difficulty of creating something out of nothing. When she began developing a syllabus for a new class, she asked ChatGPT to generate ideas, “kind of like a rubber duck that talks back.” Kane quickly discovered that ChatGPT can’t be trusted to suggest readings that actually exist, but it could suggest topics or concepts. Kane also asked colleagues on social media, as faculty tend to do, but that burdens her colleagues. “I think ChatGPT was better, honestly. It doesn’t judge, so I could ask any questions I want without being worried of sounding silly or unprepared,” she said.

Huculak and Kane hoped to overcome platitude, but Hank Blumenthal, a film producer who has worked in both industry and academia, looked to ChatGPT to gain more insight into cliché. Having been passed over for academic jobs in his area, Blumenthal wondered if his required position statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion might have been too unusual for their tastes. “My current diversity statement is about all the movies I produced where I hired Black, Asian, female, diverse crew, directors, actors,” he told me. “Still, I think schools want something else.” Given what ChatGPT can do, Blumenthal said, “I was looking to see what might be the expected discourse.”

[Read: Meet the world’s least ambitious AI]

Blumenthal doesn’t want ChatGPT to take a diversity position on his behalf. Rather, he hopes that it can help him conform to expectations. “I sought the differences between what I had done and the expected versions,” he told me. Likewise, an American University professor I spoke with copped to using AI to generate the formal “assessment criteria” that now must be a part of course and degree proposals, for example. “It did a great job at sounding like the sort of thing someone evaluating a course without knowing anything about the field would want to hear,” the professor said. The generated material was good enough to make it into the actual proposal. (I granted the professor anonymity so that the proposals would not be penalized for incorporating computer-generated text.)

A common lament about large language models holds that, having been trained on piles of existing material, they can’t provide originality. But a professor isn’t often charged with saying something truly new. Much of what we do all day is office work: writing letters, processing forms, compiling reports. AI can tame that labor, or at least offer a feeling of superiority over it.

That may be true for students too. They also feel overwhelmed and overworked: stretched thin by different professors, who each have no idea what the others have demanded; suffocated by tuition costs; confused about their future prospects; and tested by the transition to adulthood. Students come to college first for the college experience, and second to learn and earn credentials. Their faculty may view class assignments as unalloyed goods that would be sullied by a chatbot’s intervention, while students see them as distractions from the work of making sense of who they are. In that respect, AI only helps to clear away annoying obstacles, so we all can move along to doing things that really matter.