During Kevin Hassett’s latest appearance on Fox Business, the director of the National Economic Council pushed a very specific message: Data centers are awesome.
“Data centers are very good for towns because they create so many jobs, bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses and stuff like that,” Donald Trump’s top economist said late last week. He added that placing a data center in a “sleepy town” will lead to “a whole bunch of happy residents.”
It was a curious pitch. Whatever one thinks of data centers, the idea that they bring in a bunch of high-income workers is bizarre: Data centers are filled with computer servers and cooling machines, not well-paid executives — and servers are not known for buying “houses and stuff like that.”
Hassett’s rhetoric, however, was clearly an extension of the White House’s official line.
In fact, a week earlier, the president pushed a similar line on data centers. “You have to convince your community how great these things [are],” Trump said. “You can’t fight it; you have to go with it.”
The Republican president echoed the line this week during his latest Fox News interview.
“Data centers, if you look at the stats, everything’s good around [them],” he said.
The Associated Press reported a couple of weeks ago that Democrats are seizing on the backlash to data centers, even in rural areas where the party tends to fare poorly, which makes it all the more surprising to see the White House position Republicans as the data center party.
The latest national poll from Politico, released two weeks ago, 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.”
It wasn’t the only relevant evidence. A Gallup poll released in May found that 71% of Americans wouldn’t want a data center to be built in their area. In June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll pointed in the same direction, with roughly two-thirds of the country opposing construction.
And yet, Trump doesn’t seem to care. A few weeks ago, 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.”
They’re really not. As Paul Waldman explained in a recent piece for MS NOW, “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.”
With 90 days remaining before Election Day 2026, the White House is leaning into its support for data centers anyway. If Democrats are lucky, it’ll keep going.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post White House leans into its support for data centers, despite the public backlash appeared first on MS NOW.
