‘Backwards and Poor’
President Trump is leading his administration full steam ahead in supporting his friends in the tech industry as he bulldozes his way through an issue that could’ve been a relatively easy bipartisan win for him and Republicans ahead of the midterms.
But Trump has made it clear for months — since he refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill, choosing instead to try to pressure Congress to pass the SAVE Act — that he doesn’t actually care about giving Republicans in Congress or in gubernatorial races around the country any substantial wins to campaign on this fall (unless they involve a fake party convention in Dallas with Trump in the headliner slot, giving him the platform to talk about his perception of his own record so far this term).
Americans’ opposition to the construction of new data centers in their communities is widespread and growing, in rural and urban parts of the country alike. Voters across the political spectrum are enraged by the construction of the big tech facilities, which are needed to train and expand artificial intelligence capabilities, due to distrust of the tech companies pushing them. During a time of skyrocketing energy costs, the public has also expressed concerns about data centers’ energy and water consumption and the impact that will have on the communities where they are built.
A recent Fox News poll found that more than 70% of Americans are opposed to the construction of these facilities — and of the natural gas power plants that have to be built to run them.
Trump has remained loyal to the tech industry executives who have donated to his inauguration and his ballroom project and has embraced the unregulated and accelerated development of artificial intelligence models throughout his second term. Just last week, I wrote about a proposed change in federal policy at the Environmental Protection Agency that will make it easier for new data center construction to get green lit without public input, which has already sparked outrage.
Trump lashed out at Americans and, increasingly, Republicans up for reelection who are trying to demonstrate they care about affordability issues, in a Truth Social post on Monday. He claimed that opposing data center development will just make communities “backwards and poor.”
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” he said. “The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
Some on the right have tried to push the claim that the U.S. should not limit itself in becoming a world power on the development of artificial intelligence. Some have claimed that anti-data center content is being pushed online by foreign adversaries like China or Russia. But Americans are, for the most part, concerned about adding fuel to rising energy costs — electricity costs are up more than 30% since 2021 — and are suspicious of tech companies generally, with fears that rampant AI development could steal millions of jobs.
The Wall Street Journal reports that some of Trump’s closest advisers outside the administration worry Trump is shooting himself in the foot with his position on the matter ahead of the midterms:
Some of Trump’s outside political advisers have privately expressed concerns about the president’s support for data centers, worrying that the public will see him as out of touch with their concerns, according to people familiar with the matter.
Even some of his closest political allies are breaking with him publicly on the issue. As I noted last week:
In response to widespread bipartisan backlash to the development of data centers across the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid; Paxton backed him on the matter. While Abbott has openly courted tech company’s who want to construct new data centers in his state, he made the announcement in response to mounting backlash from constituents who are worried about rising power costs linked to the projects.
Trump — who signed an executive order that would expedite data center construction nationwide — called Abbott’s decision “a mistake.”
Vice President JD Vance, seemingly in response to Trump’s Truth Social this morning, tried to walk a more narrow line on Monday, telling reporters that he doesn’t think data centers are themselves “controversial,” but suggested it is important that tech companies wanting to construct new facilities find a way to also “be putting power back into the grid.”
“If you build the data center you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out,” Vance said. “And if that is happening I don’t think the data centers are that controversial, it’s when the utility bills get so much higher that’s when it’s a real problem.”
Santos’ Antics Too Much for Shady Prediction Marketplace
The former congressman who got himself booted from Congress for lying about nearly every aspect of his life leading up until he was elected was doing a bunch of shady stuff on the prediction marketplace website Kalshi. The website slapped Rep. George Santos (R-NY) with its first ever lifetime ban after Santos — who served time in prison for his fraud schemes — secretly bet on Kalshi against his own publicly announced plans to attend Trump’s State of the Union speech.
“The Compliance Department found that Santos made these statements with the intent to manipulate the price of the Yes or No contracts that he intended to purchase. Ultimately, these statements did in fact manipulate the price of said contracts,” the company said.
In addition to barring him from “direct or indirect access” to its platform, Kalshi fined Santos $71,356 — multiples of the $17,839.57 it said he made from his wagers.
Santos is not taking the matter very seriously.
High Numbers of Mail-In Ballot Rejected
The New York Times is out with a new investigative report today on the uptick in mail-in ballots being delivered late this primary season, painting an ominous picture of the United States Postal Service’s reliability in performing this essential democratic function. This comes at a time when we’re still waiting to learn whether the new USPS rules placing sweeping new restrictions on who can vote by mail will be allowed to go into effect ahead of the midterms. The rule was written in response to a Trump executive order earlier this year that seeks to give the federal government control over who can vote and who can receive a mail-in ballot. Per the Times:
The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.
The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state.
Read This From TPM Today
My colleagues Derick Dirmaier and Allegra Kirkland have been helming a revamped version of TPM’s Weekender newsletter and it is one of my favorite things to read each week. If you missed it over the weekend, catch up here: All the Massive Public Health Failures Under RFK’s HHS, Ranked
Yesterday’s Top Story
Time to Relax About Whether Abdul El-Sayed Can Win Michigan
What I’m Reading
‘The Least Transparent Midterm’: How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election
Vance characterizes Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed as ‘evil’
Embracing blatant Islamophobia, CBS News makes bizarre attempt to tie El-Sayed to 9/11
Opposition to data centers and opposition to flock cameras are creating new political fault lines. As Louis Rossmann, who is going around the country talking to people about this, says, “I saw a green haired kid and a man with a Trump 2024 shirt fist bump at one of my events after they both made their arguments.”
Donald Trump can sense the fault line, but he has placed himself on the wrong side of it.
Came up on this data center being built on a rural highway right next to the small town of Hubbard in Limestone County on Aug. 21st. Horrible sight. 14 gates into the site.
FIFY
The Donnie Party, also known as The Donner Party. Bon Appetit!!
(Kinda, sorta reiterating my post from the Morning Memo thread hours earlier, because I had no idea tonight’s Evening Briefing was gonna play Margaret Dumont to this very issue)
“AI” and “data centers” are a mass delusion: promises of magic that can never be real, but the financial powers-that-be have sunk so many trillions (with a “t”) into this madness, they can’t possibly back down, even as the runaway train races faster and faster toward the cliff face.
Maybe the boys at the top got high on their own supply, but they likely knew it was all smoke from the start; it was just so damn easy to con the lazy media, corporate managers, and investors that, once they started obscenely profiting from it, they just couldn’t stop.
It’s Dutch Tulip Mania but with silicon, Enron with Hegseth testosterone injections in both eyeballs every second of every day, total fantasy that, inevitably, will come to a crashing halt like a clown car through the storefront window of a methadone clinic.
The electrical and water resources to sustain it, let alone grow it 10,000-fold into the fairy tale they’ve spun, simply don’t exist on this or any other planet, to say nothing of the dwindling financial resources it’s now drained – with zero breakeven, much less “profit” on any timeline.
It’s (literally) Voodoo Economics.
The only question is how long the showmen can keep their plates spinning – or how quickly they drain their marks – but when the music finally stops, and they all scramble for the exits, the reckoning to America’s economy – and the global economy – is gonna be ruinous.
When that day inevitably comes, 1929 and 2007 are gonna look like the good ol’ days…