Throughout Donald Trump’s rise in Republican politics, the president and his party have repeatedly clung to the idea that their organized critics deserve to be dismissed as inauthentic. It has fueled the “paid protesters” myth that still has currency in GOP politics, and the party has applied the rhetoric to everything from No Kings events to critics of mass deportations.
The claims have long been rooted in an absurdity: Since Americans who disagree with Republicans are effectively an impossibility, protests can only be explained through corrupt schemes and illicit payments. Those on the right deserve to be seen as real, while Americans who dare to disagree must necessarily be seen as corrupt.
As data centers generate public backlash of their own, it seems inevitable that Republicans would apply the same logic — which is precisely what’s happening.
In July, for example, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, his party’s U.S. Senate nominee in North Carolina, told Fox News, “This opposition to data centers is not organic. … This is being ginned up the same way that we saw opposition to energy projects around the country.”
He didn’t say who, exactly, was responsible for “ginning up” opposition, but the underlying argument has gained traction. Just last week, Republican Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio, where the backlash to data centers has been especially intense, told Fox Business that the Chinese Communist Party has “infiltrated” his home state with “propaganda against this.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is apparently thinking along the same lines.
“This is a competition with China,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox Business. “Let’s be clear about this. And we are investigating whether China is behind a lot of this misinformation, false information against data centers. Who is funding this campaign, I think, is a good question to ask against data centers, because if it’s literally a war between America and China, China is the only one that benefits. And so we’ve been investigating it.”
The GOP leader said his party is already “finding some things,” including social media bots controlled by Beijing that Scalise claimed “are spewing out a lot of this stuff” related to data centers.
In other words, with nine weeks until Election Day 2026, one of the nation’s most powerful Republican officials wants Americans to know one thing: The GOP doesn’t just think Americans are wrong about data centers — the party also wants to investigate why Americans have been fooled into opposing data centers.
To hear Scalise tell it, data center critics may be sincere, but they are really just the victims of a conspiracy hatched by the Chinese.
Scalise’s comments came just one day after Trump, displaying a degree of condescension rarely seen or heard in national politics, wrote to his social media platform, “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.”
On one of the year’s hot-button issues, Republican leaders haven’t merely positioned themselves on the unpopular side. they are doing so in way that’s as insulting as possible to Americans’ intelligence.
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