President Donald Trump appeared to have reached his limit with the growing criticism.
The moment came after Fox News host Dana Perino aired a discussion with two Virginia residents about the spread of data centers, among them Loudoun County resident Greg Pirio, who raised concerns over noise and pollution.
The segment underscored a widening local backlash to data center development, an issue now forcing Republicans to rethink their messaging strategy ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump’s political advisers had already been privately mapping out how to handle the controversy, as Our News Outlet previously reported following a closed-door strategy dinner at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington in July.
Their guidance to candidates was to argue that data centers must cover the cost of their own electricity and water usage, while making sure any surplus benefits surrounding communities.
But Trump’s social media response ignored that more measured playbook, opting instead for a blunt and combative defense of data center expansion that brushed aside residents’ objections.
‘The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,’ Trump wrote in his post.
He argued that data centers would bring jobs and reduce local taxes, while calling on Americans to ‘let data reign.’
President Donald Trump defended his unvarnished support for data center construction
An Amazon Web Services data center in Boardman, Oregon
A data center in Hilliard, Ohio, where officials offered tax cuts and incentives for data center construction
‘If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,’ he added.
Trump, advised by the nation’s top scientific and military officials, sees the AI race as a modern-day Manhattan Project that China cannot be allowed to win.
Trump’s views on data centers echo arguments from leading AI and technology executives but often fail to resonate with voters, one Republican political strategist told Our News Outlet.
Consultants cringed when Trump called data center critics ‘backwards and poor.’
‘His team has convinced him to go all in for AI, all in for data centers,’ the strategist said. ‘He’s in a bubble.’
Several former Trump officials who left the White House in recent months are now working in AI and the broader technology industry.
Data centers accounted for roughly 4.4 percent of America’s electricity consumption in 2023 and are projected to account for up to 12 percent of demand by 2028, according to the Department of Energy.
The rapid expansion of data centers has raised concerns about pressure on local power grids, with a typical facility using as much electricity as 100,000 homes.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley firms have warned that AI could replace large numbers of white-collar jobs, hardly an easy sell for voters.
Republicans running in the midterms have started pushing back against data centers as they confront growing voter opposition to the energy-hungry projects.
‘I guess I’m backwards and poor,’ Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told reporters outside the Capitol Monday in response to Trump’s statement.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton released a plan to repeal tech industry tax incentives, even as he has been pounded by opponents for previously supporting the sales tax exemption for data centers in the state.
Sherrod Brown is pounding Republican Senator Jon Husted as the ‘face of data centers’ in Ohio.
When he was the lieutenant governor of the state, Husted worked to recruit data centers to the state, backing tax and regulation incentives to tech companies.
In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed criticized his Republican opponent Mike Rogers for his investments in tech companies, connecting them with data centers.
Donald Trump at an event with his AI advisor David Sacks
‘You can’t trust a word out of Mike’s mouth because he’s only out for himself, for Donald Trump, and for Big Tech – not Michigan,’ El-Sayed wrote on social media.
Rapid data center construction has angered Republican voters in rural districts as farmland gives way to massive concrete structures they consider unsightly.
In Texas, voters have raised concerns that data centers will burden the state’s power grid and drive up their electricity bills.
Political consultants are responding to poor polling by advising candidates to take a more nuanced approach to data centers than Trump.
The worst-case scenario, one political strategist told Our News Outlet, is that disillusioned rural Republicans stay home during the midterms.
Another strategist said Trump is increasingly becoming the face of data centers and AI because tech executives have failed to communicate the benefits of the industry.
‘AI and tech people all think they are insanely smart, but they are not good at politics. They don’t know how to sell the issue,’ the strategist told Our News Outlet.
But Trump is thinking bigger than midterm politics, a former White House official told Our News Outlet.
The President sees the expansion of data centers and AI as part of his broader economic agenda.
Data centers have become an increasingly toxic political issue for Republicans
‘The President has campaigned for a very long time on the importance of reindustrializing the United States,’ former White House deputy communications director Alex Pfeiffer told Our News Outlet.
‘These data centers are bringing good-paying blue-collar jobs and tax revenue to towns across the country.’
But data center advocates are struggling to convince Americans of their benefits.
A recent Gallup poll found that 48 percent of voters strongly oppose data centers.
A Daily Mail/JL Partners survey found that just 12 percent of Americans think data centers should be built, while 25 percent support a total ban.
But voters may be more willing to accept data centers if communities have a say over their construction.
Forty-three percent of respondents supported data centers as long as the local community agreed to their construction, according to Our News Outlet/JL Partners poll.
The survey also showed that Americans are more wary of AI than excited about it, with 38 percent saying they are frightened compared with 26 percent who are excited.
The White House, however, defended the President’s position on data centers, arguing they will cement ‘America’s dominance over China in the global AI race,’ according to deputy press secretary Davis Ingle.
Ingle noted that Trump supported tech companies and data centers paying for their own power, water, and utilities to make sure that residents did not end up with the bills.
