White House Unveils Presidential 'Relatability' Algorithm

White House Unveils Presidential 'Relatability' Algorithm

Administration claims the new system schedules smiles, pauses, and dad jokes for "maximum warmth per second."

The White House quietly released its official Presidential Algorithm for Relatable Moments today, a proprietary stack that calculates when the President should smile, pause, and (if conditions allow) deploy a tasteful dad joke. Press aides insisted the move is a modernization of speeches — and not at all a robo-charm coup.

"We're optimizing for maximum warmth-per-second," said Press Secretary Marla Finch, Office of Audience Engineering. "It's science. It's heart. It's performance art."

Officials described the algorithm as a hybrid of behavioral science, machine learning, and focus groups composed entirely of people who cry at graduation videos. The model reportedly trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of town halls, congressional hearing reaction GIFs, and 8 million comment threads labeled "liked but suspicious." (The White House would not confirm whether that last data set included the official LinkedIn endorsement archive.)

The platform — internally nicknamed "RelateR™" — claims to translate policy into palpable human vibes using a suite of modules:

• Smiles Module: calibrated micro-smile (1.2s for press, 1.7s for kids).
• Pause Engine: empathy pause (optimally 2.4s when discussing funerals, 1.8s for inflation).
• Dad-Joke Injector: 14% probability when poll numbers drop 2+ points mid-week.
• Authenticity Proxy (PAP): a composite score blending humility, humility-adjacent gestures, and the correct amount of hand-touching-your-heart.

A mock demo shown to reporters included waveform overlays measuring "resonance" and a slider labeled "Humblebrag → Humble." The algorithm outputs explicit teleprompter cues: "SMILE +0.8 | PAUSE 2.4s | JOKE: 'I told my chef about the economy...'" The joke, the system explained, would only be served if camera A detects at least 12 sympathetic faces and camera B is mercifully off.

"We A/B tested 42 handshake durations and found 1.9 seconds drives a 6.3% rise in follow-up questions that call someone 'honest,'" said Dr. Theo Kaplan, Chief Algorithmic Empathy Officer. "We're proud to be the first administration to monetize likability without selling our souls."

Ethics and transparency mechanisms were described in a one-page flyer titled "Guardrails & Good Intentions," including an oversight panel made up of two festival comedians, a retired debate coach, and one bipartisan barista.

When asked whether the algorithm would be released as open source, officials smiled for exactly 1.2 seconds and said it was "under consideration for an enterprise SaaS model to help mayors and boards-of-directors optimize their tone when unveiling new recycling bins."

Inside the memo, a single line read: "Relatability is a metric. Metrics are scalable. Scalable warmth is inevitable." The administration insisted the software will never replace actual policy — just the parts where a pause and a wink can buy you an extra news cycle.

Because politics is performance, and if you can't govern, at least schedule your charm.