Americans don’t agree about much in 2026, but a majority are in lockstep on data centers. According to recent polling, a full 75% oppose having one built anywhere near them, a number within striking distance of the 84% of Americans who oppose cutting Social Security.
Because the U.S. economy is now profoundly dependent on artificial intelligence, the growing unpopularity of the data centers that supply it is a big problem. Never fear, however, because Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress and media have a bold new strategy for solving it. They’ve lately started claiming data centers are unpopular only with backwards fools and those who’ve been deviously duped by an elaborate Chinese propaganda operation.
It’s a messaging tactic that seems destined to be received as poorly as, well, data centers themselves. With midterm elections two months away, the timing could hardly be worse.
How data centers became toxic
As recently as January 2025, data centers were considered a widely palatable necessity of our glorious AI future. Those who were against AI altogether were obviously also against data centers, but everyone else generally had less of a fixed opinion.
One of Joe Biden’s final acts as president was an executive order to accelerate AI data-center development, something his administration framed as essential for “national security, economic competitiveness, AI safety and clean energy growth.” In a photo-negative image of where the public stands now, data centers in January 2025 were among the only things Biden and Trump agreed on. One of the latter’s first moves after returning to power was announcing Stargate, a $500 billion investment in data centers and AI infrastructure in the U.S.
By the end of 2025, though, public sentiment had soured far beyond never-AI absolutists. While proponents touted the nearly 5,000 U.S. data centers as job creators that boost local economies, complaints about them were tangible, easy to understand and, crucially, bipartisan. These structures took up too much land, consumed too much water, drove up utility bills, and disrupted rural life with their thunderous noise and air pollution. Not to mention the lucrative tax breaks for tech overlords, and reduced public funds for local services.
Anti-data center animosity could no longer be waved away as a byproduct of Woke. Not when Trump voters in Pennsylvania were part of the pushback.
Throughout 2026, the shift away from data centers has rapidly spiked. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found that opposition to having them built in one’s community shot up 12 points between spring and summer, from 49% to 61%. All signs pointed to data centers becoming a liability during the midterms for any politician who favors them.
It should surprise no one that the Democratic politicians Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been calling for a moratorium on new data centers, or that, in July, New York became the first state to implement one. However, when Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in August announced a moratorium on data centers in Texas, the sea change became impossible to ignore.
Backlash to the backlash
Internal polling on data centers among Republicans is now apocalyptic, according to an Axios report on August 19, which compared the facilities’ popularity to that of “spent nuclear waste.” It was in this inhospitable environment that Trump apparently decided to push back on the pushback.
Up until quite recently, Trump had simply defended data centers, calling them “beautiful” last month. This week, he pivoted to an offensive blitz, attacking those opposed to them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers,” he wrote on TruthSocial on Monday, “is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”
The president ended his missive by noting, “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” further shaming his fans who dared to form a different opinion. Soon enough, his flunkies in Congress and conservative media seized on that aspect of his messaging strategy and took it to new conspiratorial heights.
On Tuesday morning, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, announced during an interview with Fox Business that an investigation is supposedly underway to determine whether the fervor against data centers perhaps stems from a China-driven misinformation campaign.
What other possible explanation could there be?
Shortly afterward, Brian Kilmeade, the Fox & Friends cohost, picked up the thread, claiming that a lot of the American hostility toward data centers is due to “bad information,” which was “put out by our competitors slash enemies,” meaning China, along with “other social media groups that look to influence our elections,” he claimed, by “using bots and . . . maybe influencers to start turning the American public against data centers.” Whew!
Kilmeade seems to have forgotten the hard lesson Fox News learned back in May. That’s when Shark Tank’s resident heel, Kevin O’Leary, made a similar statement on the network, claiming the nonprofit group opposing his planned massive data center in Utah was “funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.” This gambit apparently did not go unnoticed by the legal representatives of the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah.
O’Leary ended up walking back his unsubstantiated claim and admitting he had no evidence to support it, while Fox News apologized for airing it. Perhaps because Kilmeade named no specific entity being bribed by China into astroturfing anti-data center invective, he won’t be forced to make a similar retraction.
In any case, the recent full-court press admonishing U.S. citizens for having the wrong opinion about data centers has left the president and his defenders open to counterattacks.
Reporters are already hounding elected Republicans about whether they agree with Trump’s “backwards and poor” comment. Politicians like Ocasio-Cortez and Justin Pearson, a Democratic state representative in Tennessee, wondered aloud, in separate press conferences this week, why Trump doesn’t install a data center close to Mar-a-Lago if they are as wonderful as he says.
The same old cognitive dissonance
Trump’s insistence that data centers are good, actually, despite all the documented reasons to the contrary, should feel familiar by now. For the past decade, he has consistently portrayed himself as the sole arbiter of truth in a dishonest world.
Lately, though, the staggering falsity of his more outlandish claims may be getting harder to swallow for all but his most fervent fans.
If Iran is “completely defeated,” why are we still at war—and why is gas so expensive?
If vandals are responsible for damaging Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation, why have charges against all of them been dismissed?
And if the 2020 election was rigged, which he insisted again most recently with a televised speech back in July, why has no supporting evidence whatsoever emerged yet?
There’s no polling as of this writing about how Trump’s most recent messaging on data centers has gone over, but even 35% of Republicans in an Economist/YouGov poll disagreed with his statement in August about embracing them.
As we careen toward the midterms, Trump’s sweaty claims about the supposed beauty of data centers just may broadly come across as authentic as one of his AI slop posts on Truth Social.