The Issue That Could End MAGA

Trump is committing political suicide with his message on AI data centers: “You can’t fight it. You have to go with it.” Our thoughts on why Trump is picking the most unpopular fight of the cycle.

Donald Trump has a message for communities worried about massive AI data centers popping up in their backyards:

Stop complaining.

At a recent event (to promote data center investment, of course), Trump brushed off Americans’ concerns over the sprawling facilities, telling supporters that communities would be “foolish” not to welcome them.

“You can’t fight it. You have to go with it,” Trump declared.

That’s an easy thing to say for someone who will never have to live with the environmental and physical consequences.

Data centers have risen to the forefront of the conversation in the last few years as they have begun cropping up in communities all across America. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them entirely, here’s the recap: They’re warehouse-sized complexes packed with servers that consume staggering amounts of electricity, guzzle millions of gallons of water, generate constant industrial noise, and require enough power to rival entire cities.

Needless to say, folks aren’t huge fans!

Across the country, residents have packed zoning meetings, flooded county board hearings, and organized grassroots campaigns to stop new projects from being built near their homes.

They’re not just opposed to them because they’re eye sores. After a data center comes online, electricity bills for the community soar. Home values, the single-largest component of net worth for tens of millions of Americans, collapse. Farmland turns bad. Rivers and streams become contaminated and toxic. Their noise creates a constant, unending hum disrupting local wildlife and making everyday life unbearable. Even worse, these facilities create virtually zero permanent jobs once construction is completed, leaving communities to saddle 100% of the burden without any lasting benefit.

Worst of all?

Communities aren’t being given a voice. Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google are requiring local officials, state regulators, and city council members to sign non-disclosure agreements before they can learn about the massive power demands, resource drain, and environmental impacts. Permits are being rushed through, zoning is being revised silently, and Republicans at every level of government are doing whatever they can to keep the public out of the process.

Why, you might ask?

Follow the money. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and all the rest of the tech oligarchs spending billions to build AI data centers are the same ones who “donated” millions of dollars to Trump after his election and have spent disgusting amounts of money lobbying Washington to accelerate AI infrastructure. Funny how the party that’s spent the last 20 years warning about the dangers of Big Tech suddenly can’t do enough to help it expand.

In perhaps the most egregious example, a planned solar energy and storage facility approved in 2023 on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management was changed at the last minute to not be an energy creator (as solar energy is) but to build a data center that will consume more energy than the entire city it sits next to.

If you ask Trump though, all of that is just foolish. Communities should embrace something that brings no real benefit yet significant local costs to their health and wealth all because it will make Trump’s disgustingly rich tech friends even richer. At your expense.

Some Democrats at the local, state, and federal level have insisted on something truly groundbreaking: oversight and regulation (sarcasm intended).

In two separate hearings on the impacts of data centers on drinking water and local environments, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up two jars of cloudy, dirty, undrinkable water from a local community in Morgan County, Georgia after Meta opened a new data center in the area. In doing so, she underscored the fact that it’s overwhelmingly impoverished, underprivileged, or minority communities facing the brunt of the unlivable conditions data centers create in their surrounding environments.

In another hearing, Ocasio-Cortez asked whether Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg would ever live next to one of their own data centers. Representative Ocasio-Cortez then asked the committee members themselves, seated all around her, to raise their hand if anyone – Republican or Democrat – wanted to live next to a data center. Not a single member did.

In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a first-in-the-nation moratorium on data center construction to protect local economies and energy resources, and to allow state policymakers and experts enough time to properly assess just how profound an impact new data center construction will be.

In Virginia, the data center capital of the world, Democratic lawmakers approved new taxes on data centers after years of Republican-backed tax breaks helped fuel its explosive growth. The message was simple: if you’re going to build facilities that will place enormous demands on public infrastructure, ignoring the very real public health impacts, you’re going to help pay for the consequences.

Environmentalist Erin Brockovich launched a website tracking where data centers have been, are being, or will be built across the United States, underscoring that there are still, by a 2:1 margin, far more data centers currently under construction or that are trying to be brought online than currently exist. In short, the detrimental effects we’ve already seen are just the beginning.

So, to make sure we’ve got it right, Republicans …

• Are aware of how damaging data centers are to local economies, environments, and livelihoods

• Know how little long-term benefit data centers bring

• Refuse to live near them

… and yet want to do whatever it takes to build more, to build faster, and to bulldoze through any regulations that stand in their way.

Got it.

Let’s also put this in perspective: in 2026, people living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world are still having to fight for clean drinking water. If that doesn’t tell you that there’s a catastrophic imbalance of power and wealth within the United States, then we don’t know what will.

The party that holds every lever of power has become the party that asks for forgiveness rather than permission. The only problem is you’re the one facing the consequences of their willful negligence. By contrast, Democrats aren’t seeking to stop AI in its tracks, but to not lose sight of who politicians serve: the people. Common-sense, reasoned regulations that protect communities, individuals, and the environment shouldn’t be controversial, and certainly aren’t foolish, as Trump would have you believe.

In Trump’s America, your needs, your health, and your prosperity aren’t just secondary; they’re expendable. You’re expendable. In Trump’s America, each of us are but means to his destructive ends, and until we elect leaders courageous enough to stand up to him, we’ll continue to be powerless to stop him.