Donald Trump has decided that artificial intelligence has a branding problem.

And look, he’s not wrong that nobody walks into a room and says, “Hey, can we talk about the artificial stuff?” The word “artificial” has a whole baggage problem. Artificial flavor. Artificial light. Artificial turf. It sounds like a compromise, like the real thing wasn’t available. So the man who put his name on steaks, a hotel, a tower, a university, and a golf course that somehow isn’t in the shape of a Taj Mahal looked at the acronym “AI” and said, I can do better.

This weekend, he took to X (formerly Twitter, formerly Twitter, formerly Twitter) and wrote:

“Many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence.”

He then offered three alternatives that would, in his words, “better capture all the excitement and endless possibility that AI presents”:

• Superior Intelligence (SI)
• Extreme Intelligence (EI)
• Supreme Intelligence (SI)

He attached a poll. You could vote. You could pick your favorite. It was, essentially, a focus group for the most important technology shift of the century, and the options were “Superior,” “Extreme,” and “Supreme.”

I’ll be honest. I didn’t vote. But I did notice that two of the three options share the same acronym, SI, which means the whole exercise might have just collapsed into “which S-word feels right.”

And here’s the thing that makes this land differently than it would from, say, a tech CEO at a keynote. Trump isn’t a branding consultant who happens to be president. He’s a man who has spent forty years putting his name on buildings and calling it a business strategy. To him, a name isn’t a description. It’s a claim. It’s a flag you plant in the ground and say, this is mine, this is mine, this is bigger than the thing next to it.

“Superior Intelligence” isn’t a technical correction. It’s a victory lap before the product ships.

And the poll? That’s not market research. That’s a rally. You don’t poll your base to find out what they think. You poll your base so they can participate in the naming. So they can say, “I voted for Supreme.” So the name becomes theirs, too.

Whether the acronym sticks is almost beside the point. “AI” is already in every keyboard, every API, every child’s vocabulary. You’re not renaming a word. You’re renaming a moment. And Trump, for all his other misreads of the room, understands that perfectly.

The question is whether “Supreme Intelligence” makes the base feel like they’re on the winning side of a revolution, or whether it makes them feel like they’re watching a man in a red tie do a soundbite about a thing he’s never used.

I suspect the poll results will tell you which one it is. And I suspect the results won’t matter. He’ll pick whichever one he wants, and it’ll be in the next press release, and nobody will use it, and in six months it’ll be a footnote in a “remember when” list.

But for this weekend, at least, the man who named a steak “Trump Steak” got to name the future. And for him, that’s the whole game.

Unfortunately for Trump, names like Superior or Supreme Intelligence backfire. Instead of sounding inspiring, they sound threatening—suggesting an AI destined to rule over us. That’s a strange pitch for a populist base deeply suspicious of unchecked power.

“Superior intelligence” actually won Trump’s first poll with 41.5% of the vote. But if the goal was to calm fears about AI—whether that’s displacing millions of workers or eventually rendering humans obsolete—it was a terrible branding choice. Calling AI “superior” inherently implies that human intelligence is “inferior,” which is a tough pitch for a populist base. (Though, to be fair, people did vote for it.)

Sensing the dissonance, Trump quickly pivoted to a second poll on Truth Social, pitting “Superior Intelligence” against “Super Intelligence.” The latter won handily, and Trump immediately adopted it, even using “SI” in a post where he compared AI doomerism to climate change—dismissing both as overblown.

Of course, “superintelligence” isn’t a new concept. Philosopher Nick Bostrom coined “artificial superintelligence” way back in 1997 to describe a machine smarter than the best human brains in every field—usually in the context of an entity that could wipe us out. So, Trump is only about 30 years late to that party.

Then there’s his latest brainchild: the “AI Force,” modeled after Space Force, complete with an upcoming AI “Czar” where “only high I.Q. individuals need apply.”

Once again, a little more thought in the workshop would have helped. “AI Force” doesn’t exactly inspire awe; it sounds like AI is being forced onto an unwilling public, or conjures images of autonomous weapons. Neither is a winning vibe for the average voter.

Trump is right that AI has a messaging problem, but his read on the technology is otherwise completely off. This is the same leader telling his base they “have to go with it” regarding data centers, despite intense local pushback from his own supporters.

It raises a lingering question: Why is Trump hitching his wagon to AI when outright opposing big tech feels like an easy populist win? The answer is likely a mix of motives—massive tech-sector campaign donations from 2024, framing AI as a weapon in the geopolitical race against China, and the reality that tech market optimism might be the only thing standing between the economy and a severe recession.