Team Trump rallies in support of data centers as the public turns against them

With 15 weeks remaining before Election Day 2026, and even less time before early voting gets underway in much of the country, it stands to reason that Donald Trump would be going out of his way to position Republican officials and candidates for electoral success.

Unfortunately for the GOP, however, the president seems to be doing the opposite.

The war with Iran is unpopular, but Trump apparently doesn’t care. Most voters don’t want to hear about the president’s obsession with 2020 election conspiracy theories, but Trump apparently doesn’t care about that, either. Americans might like the bipartisan housing bill that recently cleared Congress and became law, but Trump made sure his party didn’t get any political benefit from this, either.

And then there’s data centers. A new national poll from Politico found that Americans’ attitudes toward data centers “have grown increasingly sour and politically polarized in the past six months,” and “the growing opposition to the sprawling, server-packed data hubs is coming from both sides of the political aisle.”

Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First, which conducted the survey, said of the results, “It’s rare to see political attitudes change this fast in an era where they are often quite static and partisan.”

There’s no reason to assume this is an outlier: A Gallup poll released in May found 71% of Americans saying they wouldn’t want a data center to be constructed in their area. Last month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll pointed in the same direction, with roughly two-thirds of the country opposing the recent trend in building these structures.

But as public opposition to data centers intensifies, the White House is moving in the opposite direction. Last week, the president published an item to his social media platform in which he declared, with his usual idiosyncratic approach to capitalization, “One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers. They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built.”

As this week got underway, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum similarly argued during a Fox Business appearance that data centers could provide “a personalized tutor” for schoolchildren.

Both Trump and Burgum have chosen to ignore the downsides, which, as Paul Waldman explained in his latest piece for MS NOW, are plentiful:

Data centers require massive amounts of power, potentially straining the local grid and causing energy prices to spike. They use enormous quantities of water to cool the equipment, leading residents to fear for the future of their water supply. And many residents who live near one report an unceasing hum from the computers, fans, generators and other equipment, which can make living near a data center intolerable. 

Those problems, plus the speed at which the facilities are cropping up all over the country, has created a backlash that is growing at a stunning pace.

If Democrats are lucky, Trump and his team will continue to position Republicans as the party of data centers over the next 15 weeks.

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This article was originally published on ms.now