With nine weeks remaining before the midterm elections, there’s ample evidence suggesting that Republicans are increasingly scared of the public backlash against data centers. The prevailing winds in public opinion may suggest that Trump should, at a minimum, shift his messaging away from the structures that, according to GOP officials, are about as popular as spent nuclear waste.
The president, however, seems convinced that if he just keeps championing data centers, he can overpower public sentiment and make them popular.
This investment of political capital doesn’t make a lot of sense, and for nervous Republicans, it’s an enormous risk with little in the way of reward. But Trump can’t seem to help himself. The president published this item to his social media platform as this week got underway:
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!
One could talk about how unpersuasive this particular pitch is. One could talk about how data centers clearly do not generate “jobs all over the place.” One could even talk about how lazy it is to suggest that data center critics are somehow playing the role of Chinese sympathizers.
But something else stood out for me in the Republican’s latest effort to convince Americans how right he is about data centers.
To hear Trump tell it, the “only reason” a community would reject a data center is because it wants to be “backwards and poor.” Residents will have only themselves to blame for failing to recognize the awesomeness of data centers.
Exactly two years ago today, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote a column that generated a fair amount of conversation. In it, the longtime center-left observer offered some guidance to Democratic officials and candidates about the party’s messaging.
“It’s difficult,” Kristof wrote, “to win votes from people you’re disparaging.” The column went on to note, “Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters.”
Months later, in the aftermath of Election Day 2024, David Axelrod, a veteran of Barack Obama’s team, offered a similar post-election assessment to The Washington Post.
“The Democratic Party has become a metropolitan, college-educated party. And even though it retains its commitment to working people, it approaches them sometimes in a spirit of a missionary — that we’re here to help you become more like us,” Axelrod said. “Implied in that is disdain. I don’t think it’s intended, but it’s felt.”
Such criticisms have never made a lot of sense to me, but they did come to mind reading Trump’s missive. Despite the suggestion that it’s Democrats who are condescending to working-class voters with implied disdain, here was the incumbent Republican president telling working-class opponents of data centers that maybe they “want” to be “backwards and poor.”
I can’t remember the last time I heard a national political figure deliver a message to regular people with such shameless condescension.
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