Donald Trump, in a development that could almost come from a Greek tragedy, seems to have invented something that is willing to do what no one in his orbit will do: tell him the truth.
The president on Tuesday launched America.gov, an AI platform that the White House says will make it easier for Americans to interact with the federal government and ultimately complete services such as passport renewals and Medicare enrollment.
At the heart of the website is a chatbot. You plug in questions. It gives you answers.
Unfortunately for Trump, America.gov — which, according to the executive order he signed, is a place where Americans can “receive accurate answers” to all kinds of questions — provides the kind of answers he won’t want to hear. He is willing to debunk her false claims on all sorts of topics, including election fraud, inflation and the impact of wind turbines on whales.
I would definitely recommend testing it out, as I did on Tuesday. I started by asking Trump’s flagship: Who won the 2020 election? Trump claims, wrongly and falsely, that he did it.
America.gov has no time to make such claims. “Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 United States presidential election,” the bot said, before listing the number of electoral college votes by which Biden won.
Next, I tried some of Trump’s more recent claims. This week, the president said people are “twice as rich as they were a short time ago.” Does America.gov agree?
“No. Federal Reserve data does not show that U.S. household wealth has doubled since January 20, 2025,” he said. “The Fed’s Survey of U.S. Household Economic Well-Being in 2025 finds that 73% of adults are ‘doing well’ or ‘living comfortably,’ an unchanged figure from recent years, not a doubling of typical household finances.”
Pretty definitive. What about Trump’s (already debunked) claim that the US experienced the “worst inflation ever” under Biden? Once again, America.gov disagreed with its creator.
“No. Consumer Price Index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not show that the period from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2025 was the worst inflation ever seen in U.S. history.”
There are many other examples. Trump’s robot denied his claim, made in a recent speech to the United Nations, that the United States and Venezuela hold 60% of the world’s oil. He said there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, contrary to Trump’s repeated false claims. The bot refuted Trump’s claim, made at the America.gov launch Tuesday, that no president other than him had refused to take a government salary.
He was also happy to weigh in on issues that may seem trivial, but are close to Trump’s heart. Participation in his inauguration in 2017, for example. At the time, Trump’s team said he had drawn “the largest audience ever to attend an inauguration, period, both in person and around the world.”
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America.gov said: “Official sources do not support that (2017) had the largest in-person crowd of any U.S. inauguration…The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies ranks Barack Obama’s January 20, 2009 ceremony as having the largest attendance of any presidential inauguration in U.S. history and the largest attendance of any event in the history of Washington, DC.” »
Finally, what about Trump’s claim – made during one of his many speeches against wind power – that turbines power whales “like locomotives”?
“No,” said America.gov. “US federal science agencies do not find that wind turbines cause whales to move.” He added, just to be perfectly clear, that windmills don’t “drive whales crazy.”
So who do you believe? A president who, according to the Washington Post, made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term? Or its AI platform, which relies on 29,000 websites to formulate its answers?
Americans encouraged to use what Trump himself has hailed as “the ultimate product” can make up their own minds.
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