The Economist Magazine Cover For 01/25/2025

Cover Story: America has an imperial presidency Inbox The Economist Unsubscribe 10:02 AM (8 hours ago) to me The Economist Read in browser January 25th 2025 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image Insert a clear and simple description of the image Edward Carr Deputy editor We went into this week knowing that the news would be dominated by the inauguration of Donald Trump. We expected him to say or do something to stir headline-writers into a frenzy. But we didn’t know what form that something would take—nor how important it would be. That is why we had to be ready for two possibilities. One was intended to hold the front page worldwide if Mr Trump’s sound and fury signified nothing new. The other was that we would have to put the man on the cover—again. Inevitably, perhaps, we ended up with Plan B. One of the lines that leapt out to us from Mr Trump’s inaugural address was his praise of William McKinley, who took office in 1897. In the greatness stakes McKinley is a long way behind America’s Rushmore-ranking presidents. By bringing him up, what was Mr Trump trying to say? McKinley was an imperialist, who added Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to American territory. He loved tariffs and he was backed by the commercial titans of the time. The new “golden age” Mr Trump envisions thus superficially resembles the Gilded Age. We thought about superimposing Mr Trump’s scowl over the face of his lesser-known predecessor. What emerged was a monstrous chimera with an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill. That would not do at all. This menacing treatment is much more powerful. It’s remarkable how clearly identifiable Mr Trump is by his eyes alone. Mr Trump wants to be as unencumbered by 20th-century norms as McKinley was in 1897. He has thrown off the governance reforms that were brought in after Watergate. The consensus that America should be a benign superpower, born out of the ashes after 1945, has gone, too. And Mr Trump wants more: to see America unleashed, freed from political correctness, from the bureaucracy and, in some cases, even from the law. Yet the 21st-century presidency is much more powerful than it was in McKinley’s day; and the new imperial president spies enemies to conquer not only abroad—in Greenland and Panama—but at home, too. The problem with this design lies with the hapless William McKinley. We can see 80% of his face and yet he is still completely anonymous. It could be almost anybody. Without instant recognition, the whole design fails. The Economist So we opted for a caricature. Lest Mr Trump look like a doorman at one of his own hotels, we needed to signal that we were peering back in time. We took our inspiration from Project 2025—the programme for government devised by Trump-supporting operatives (and disowned by the candidate during the campaign because it scared off voters). Mr Trump’s second term promises something old and new, an ideology from the railroad era mixed with the ambition to plant the flag on Mars. Project 2025 meets Project 1897. Mr Trump means to turn the presidency’s immense power inward as well as outward, to dominate America as no other president has since the second world war. Politics is in his favour. A long power shift away from the gridlocked Congress has left the courts and the executive in charge. That sets up a clash between Mr Trump and his felt-tip pens on one hand and the judges and their gavels on the other. America’s remaining checks and balances are about to be tested. If there is a single technology America needs to bring about the “thrilling new era of national success” that Mr Trump promised in his inauguration speech, it is generative artificial intelligence. Yet even as Mr Trump was giving his oration, a Chinese firm released the latest impressive large language model (LLM). Suddenly, America’s lead over China in AI looks in danger. We were taken by two visual metaphors for China’s success. One is to treat the cover as a windscreen, and to show Chinese AI catching up in the rear-view mirror. The other is to use a robot as a metonym for the AI that might power it—and to have a muscle-bound mechanical arm. China’s LLMs are not the very best. But they are far cheaper to make. QwQ, owned by Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, was launched in November and is less than three months behind America’s top models. DeepSeek, whose creator was spun out of an investment firm, ranks seventh by one benchmark. It was apparently trained using 2,000 second-rate chips—versus 16,000 first-class chips for Meta’s model, which DeepSeek beats on some rankings. The cost of training an American LLM is tens of millions of dollars and rising. DeepSeek’s owner says it spent less than $6m. Here is the catch-up idea in two different versions. The dragon is scary and the dice are fluffy–or, rather, they contain fluff, but it’s not entirely clear what this has to do with artificial intelligence. The wing mirror lets us get in the joke from “Jurassic Park” about the proximity of a predatory object. But the mirror is on the passenger side and it evokes electric vehicles rather than artificial brains. That is why we preferred this. We now have a skinny Chinese arm-wrestling a dench American—and holding its own. The progress of DeepSeek and QwQ makes clear that China will innovate around obstacles such as an American embargo on cutting-edge chips. If China stays close to the frontier of innovation, it could be the first to make the leap to superintelligence, with world-changing consequences. Some tech whizzes promise that the next wave of discoveries will once again put America far in front. Perhaps. But it would be dangerous to take America’s lead for granted. Cover image • View large image (“Project 1897: The imperial presidency”) • View large image (“China’s lean, mean AI machine”) Backing stories → America has an imperial presidency (Leader) → America really could enter a golden age (United States) → The success of cheap Chinese AI poses a dilemma for Donald Trump (Leader)