Donald Trump has spent years demanding Americans believe he won the 2020 election. It took seconds for his shiny new government website to tell them he didn’t.
The president unveiled America.gov on Tuesday as a futuristic “front door” to the federal government—a one-stop shop designed to spare Americans from navigating a maze of clunky websites and give what Trump said would be fast and accurate information.
“This is a very big, very important thing,” Trump said as he unveiled the website at a forum with cabinet officials and tech leaders on Tuesday.
The AI-powered portal is intended to eventually let people do everything from finding jobs and searching government websites to enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.
It went live on Tuesday, allowing users to type questions into a search bar that generates AI chatbot-style responses.
As such, the Daily Beast asked if Trump won the 2020 election.
“No. Official certified results show Joseph R Biden Jr won the 2020 election,” it replied, providing the Electoral College and popular vote results.
How can I obtain the $5,000 dividend the president promised me, we also asked, in reference to the announcement Trump made at the GOP convention last month.
“The President’s quoted condition is that Republicans win the House and the Senate,” it replied.
We also asked a random question from the perspective of someone interested in joining the military, but was worried about job security. How many people has Pete Hegseth fired?
“I can not give a verified number,” came the answer.
Is the Pentagon the Department of Defense or the Department of War?
“The legal name is still the Department of Defense.”
The website was unveiled with suitably enormous tech-world fanfare at Washington’s gilded Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where Trump appeared alongside cabinet officials and a parade of Silicon Valley royalty.
But some members of the public who attempted to navigate the website on Tuesday were often given a simple message: “Chat is unavailable right now.”
And despite being called “America.gov,” it appears to use some images that are not from the U.S at all.
One of the rotating photographs on the homepage, for example, shows an Asian woman and young child, which looks remarkably similar to a stock photo called “Adorable girl and mother using digital tablet,” which comes from a photographer based in Beijing.
Nonetheless, the government hopes the initiative will revolutionize federal information flow.
Currently, the site can only answer questions and direct users on how to complete various tasks themselves. But officials say that by 2027, citizens should be able to use the site to complete government forms and track the status of various applications.
Elon Musk, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp were among the headline guests at the launch on Tuesday.
Later, Trump was due to host a White House lunch with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Nvidia’s Huang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman.
Behind the project is Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who runs the administration’s National Design Studio, along with Peter Arnell, the administration’s first “chief brand architect.”
Arnell has worked on brands including Pepsi, Chrysler and M&M’s—and is perhaps best known for the spectacularly ill-fated 2009 Tropicana redesign.
And then there is Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the former DOGE goon who now serves as the National Design Studio’s head of engineering.
Trump said America.gov was the beginning of a government-wide digital makeover.
For now, though, its first big achievement may be rather more basic: fact-checking the president.
