Ever since Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator in 2015, he has been a master of shaping and wielding public opinion, to the delight of some and the disgust of others.
Now, though, Trump finds himself in an unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable position — he is out of sync with many of his most natural supporters. Conservatives are turning sharply against data centers, which are the necessary foundations of one of the Trump administration’s priorities: promoting more use of artificial intelligence.
On multiple occasions this summer, and twice over the course of one recent week, Trump has tried to turn back the growing tide of public opinion against data centers.
“I’m only saying that if I ran a community … if I was a mayor or if I was a governor in the state, I would want to have the data centers because they bring tremendous income,” he said at a White House event with technology leaders.
Later, he took to Truth Social to post: “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. 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! President DJT.”
There’s a lot here to examine, both politically and economically. The politics are easier, so let’s start with those.
Trump is losing his touch on multiple issues
He promised no more “forever wars” but now potentially has one of his own making in Iran. He ran against the inflation of the Biden years but now dismisses “affordability” as a “con job by Democrats,” when, in reality, they were trying to parrot his focus on high prices. At a time when poll after poll shows voters concerned about the economy, Trump has seemed more focused on building a ballroom — and picking a fight with our friendliest neighbor and second-biggest trade customer.
All these are subjects that national commentators have dealt with in length, so I will not dwell on those, except to point them out — and note that Trump’s public relations campaign for data centers fits into a big picture of the president winding up on the wrong side of public opinion, even with many of his own supporters. The Commonwealth Poll from Virginia Commonwealth University this summer showed that while Democrats may have been the first to voice skepticism of data centers, it’s now Republicans — especially rural Republicans — who are driving the opposition. These are Trump voters, but they are not heeding Trump’s admonitions on this topic. (See the data in a previous column.)
This raises questions we can’t answer: What else might those voters part company with Trump on? And what will the last years of his presidency be like if he can’t command his supporters the way he once did? Or is this a one-off kind of issue simply because voters don’t connect data centers and AI policy with Trump in the same way that they do, say, immigration policy?
Chinese-owned farmland is a hot button; why isn’t AI?
Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, recently sent out an email blast with the subject line: “Do you approve of China buying American farmland?”
The email warned against the practice and then invited recipients to cast a vote in an online poll on the subject. I can’t imagine many people voted “yes.”
In Trump’s first term, one of his big concerns was Chinese ownership of TikTok. When Glenn Youngkin was governor, he nixed Virginia’s bid for a Ford plant that was eyeing Pittsylvania County because of concerns about Ford’s ties to a Chinese battery maker. (The land at the Southern Virginia Mega Site instead went to Microporous, an American-owned battery maker, and the coming Stack data center complex.)
There are certainly plenty of Democrats who have warned about Chinese competition, but the point here is that Republicans have been particularly vocal on the topic. So why then are conservatives turning against data centers when the AI build-out is part of making sure that China doesn’t dominate the AI sphere in the future? This is the technological equivalent of the space race of the 1960s, just with potentially higher stakes. Trump is not wrong when he writes that “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
A Stanford University report this year said that China passed the United States in the number of AI-related patents it issued sometime around 2020 and now issues four times as many as we do. By some measures, China now holds about 60% of the world’s AI-related patents. We get inflamed about the prospect of Chinese investors owning some American land; shouldn’t we be just as worried, in fact more so, about the prospect of a future where the Chinese control a technology that’s now seeping into almost every aspect of our lives? Of course, it’s hard to motivate people with the fear of losing a race that they don’t want to be in.
Trump’s defense of data centers is complicated by Americans’ hatred of big tech companies
We are absolutely in a race with the Chinese. At this point, it may not be a matter of whether we will win, but rather making sure we don’t lose. Here’s one big difference between today’s AI race and the space race of the 1960s: Getting to the moon first was considered an act of patriotism that we could all glory in (although Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas and some other contractors gloried more than others with some handsome contracts). This AI buildout doesn’t strike most people as a race with China; it seems more about making some tech companies rich — and Americans have come to despise “Big Tech.”
A lot of the online chatter I see is focused on how these data centers are just about making “tech bros” rich, not about improving our lives and certainly not about making sure the AI agents we have to deal with when we contact the insurance company aren’t speaking Chinese when we’re not watching.
The distaste for tech companies has become pretty universal. A Navigator Research Report earlier this summer revealed some fascinating aspects of public opinion. Democrats were more hostile to Big Tech than Republicans were — 86% of Democrats but only 46% of Republicans agreed that “Big Tech, social media and AI CEOs are part of a corrupt elite who profit off harmful, addictive products.”
However, when the pollsters looked at the data geographically, they found it didn’t matter where people live — rural, suburban and urban voters were all equally hostile to data centers. Since most rural voters are overwhelmingly Republican, that tells me that the anti-tech Republicans are largely rural voters, which means metro Republicans are likely less anti-tech. That might be part of the disconnect we now see developing between Trump and some of his supporters: While he has always done exceptionally well with rural voters, he’s not rural. He’s a businessman and, in this case, aligned with the Big Tech companies that his rural supporters don’t like.
That’s led us to situations like this: After Botetourt County announced that Google had bought land in the county’s business park for a data center, Blue Ridge District Supervisor Walt Michael — a Republican — wrote an opinion piece in which he made the case that the data center was in line with Trump’s policies. That was a perfectly logical extrapolation of Trump’s position, and you’d think in a county that voted almost 72% for Trump that would have been a popular position.
Instead, we’ve seen Michael (and other Republican supervisors in Botetourt) excoriated in a Facebook group called Botetourt Conservatives and Independent Thinkers. A favorite tactic of those in that group who are opposed to the Google data center in Botetourt is to post memes that caricature Botetourt officials in unflattering ways. Those memes are generated by artificial intelligence, which means they’re using a data center somewhere.
Since I just referenced Google, I need to make our standard disclosure that Google is one of the donors for our New River Valley expansion, although donors have no say in news decisions. You can see our policy here. You can also test it by becoming a donor and having no say. Tuesday, I’ll look at some of the economic arguments Trump is making about data centers. Google won’t like some of the facts and figures I will present there.
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