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During a meeting with tech leaders at the White House last week, President Donald Trump championed the rapid construction of artificial intelligence data centers across the U.S. as political common sense. “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” he said. “And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind.”
About a year ago, Trump’s comment may have been uncontroversial. But today it’s a gaffe.
The president’s own party is in a panic about a growing national backlash against data centers and has been scrambling to create distance from them. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo obtained by Axios warned that Democrats were being effective at negatively tying Sen. Jon Husted, R.-Ohio, to data centers, which had “become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”
This in turn leaves a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to respond and win on the issue of data centers. |
