What did Donald Trump do today?

He used a diplomatic address to try to pump up his stock portfolio.

Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly today. His speech was full of obvious lies and at least one prosecutable incitement to genocide—or, at least, it would have been if other world leaders still took him seriously. 

TRUMP: I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world. Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

Trump didn't explain why he hasn't been able to defeat Iran, or even control the terms of the war as it approaches seven full months, but he did demand that his audience ignore confirmed reports that he has run the United States military almost entirely out of key munitions.

But Trump also used the speech to dabble in a favorite hobby: rebranding. Much as he decreed that the federal government would have to use his new names for Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, he announced that the federal government would now call artificial intelligence "super intelligence." According to Trump, "from this point forward, all of United States' documents, and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the more accurate term 'super' as opposed to 'artificial.'"

"Superintelligence" is already a term of art in AI research, describing a level of function that current models are nowhere near approaching, but Trump—who cited his then 10-year-old son as a computer genius at the start of his first term—almost certainly doesn't know that.

The more likely rationale is financial. Trump and his family members have invested heavily in the companies that develop AI models or supply them with hardware, and he has been using the federal purse as a way to goose the value of those investments, so he may believe that demanding that people use a different word for the technology could also make him money. 

But it may also simply be that Trump is aware that people are talking about something and has become deeply anxious to make sure that they associate it with him, which is a familiar pattern. 

Whatever the actual potential of AI technologies, the sudden push to redeem the value of Trump's investment isn't going smoothly. Posters saying "I want you to use AI!" and showing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in an "Uncle Sam" pose have gone up in the halls at the Pentagon. But last week, CNN reported that the US military was on the verge of boarding a Chinese ship—something China's government likely would have interpreted as an act of war—because an AI hallucination had incorrectly flagged it as carrying nuclear components to Iran. 

Why does this matter?

• "It will make the president rich" is a stupid reason for a government to do something. 

• "It will soothe the president's ego" is even worse.