On Monday, facing a growing revolt in communities across the country over the AI data centers being built in their backyards, President Trump got on Truth Social and delivered his message to the people worried about it.
“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,” he wrote. If they don’t fall in line, he added, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”
Backwards and poor. That’s what the President of the United States called the Americans concerned about a real issue in their own hometowns. And this response tells us all we need to know about where this man and this presidency have ended up.
Let me start with the actual policy issue. Data centers are not some fringe concern cooked up by activists. Roughly seven in ten Americans say they don’t want one built in their community, and that opposition cuts clean across party lines. People are worried about their electricity bills going up. They’re worried about the staggering amounts of water these facilities pull from local supplies. They’re worried about what happens to the character of a place when a hulking, humming warehouse the size of a stadium goes up next to the neighborhood.
More than 500 localities have already stalled these projects. New York passed a statewide moratorium. This is one of the rare issues where the farmer in Texas and the retiree in upstate New York are saying exactly the same thing.
Now, you can disagree with them. There’s a real argument to be made about American competitiveness, about jobs, about not ceding the future of this technology to China. If you believe in data centers, then go make that case. But here’s the thing about making a case: it requires you to actually respect the people you’re trying to convince. It requires you to show up, listen to their concerns, and treat them like adults whose worries are legitimate even when you think they’re mistaken.
That is what leadership looks like. And it is precisely what Donald Trump is incapable of.
Look at the split screen from Monday. On the very same day Trump was calling data center opponents backwards and poor, his own Vice President, JD Vance, was out there saying “I feel your pain” about the exact same issue. Now, I have plenty of disagreements with JD Vance. But he understands something Trump has forgotten, which is that when a whole lot of voters are upset about something, the move is to meet them where they are, not to insult them and dare them to vote against you.
And here’s what makes it so striking. There was a time when Trump understood this well. Go back to 2016. When Hillary Clinton stood up at a fundraiser and called half of his supporters a “basket of deplorables,” Trump pounced. He called it “the most explicit attack on the American voter” ever made by a major party nominee. He said, and I quote, “You cannot run for president if you have such contempt in your heart for the American voter. You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion of its citizens.”
Trump then built an entire campaign theme on the idea that the other side looked down on ordinary Americans while he was the one who respected them.
So measure the man against his own standard. Clinton, for all the damage that comment did to her, was talking about a slice of the opposing party’s coalition, and within 24 hours she publicly said she regretted it and walked back the word “half.”
Trump on Monday was talking about his own voters. The people in red communities and swing districts who put their trust in him. He looked at everyday Americans worried about their water and their power bills and told them they must want to be backwards and poor. By his own 2016 definition, that is contempt for the American voter, and it is worse than the thing he spent weeks hammering Clinton for.
Why does a politician do this? Why insult the very people you need in November? It’s because he he has run out of anything else.
And ultimately, if you disagree with him, he’ll ominously tell you that “you can’t fight it, you have to go with it.”
Persuasion is hard. It requires patience, humility, and a genuine belief that you can change someone’s mind by respecting it. Bullying is easy. It’s what you reach for when you’ve lost the ability to do the hard thing. And everything about this White House right now points to a man who has lost that ability.
His approval numbers are historically low. His party is nervous heading into the midterms. His own senate campaign committee flagged data centers as a sleeper issue that could cost them seats. The smart political move, the obvious one, is to listen and empathize. He can’t do it. So he calls people names instead, and he hopes people mistake the cruelty for strength.
It isn’t strength. It never is. The strongest thing a leader can do is sit across from someone who disagrees, take their concerns seriously, and try to win them over honestly. The weakest thing a leader can do is stand at a distance and hurl insults because he’s decided the people who serve under him owe him their agreement. Real authority persuades. Only fear and ego demand.
Here’s what I’d say to anyone in one of those communities who felt the sting of being called backwards and poor by the man they voted for. Your concerns are legitimate. You are allowed to ask questions about what gets built next to your home, what it does to your bills, and where your water goes. That is not being backwards. That is being a citizen. And a president who can only respond to your questions with insults is telling you something important about how much he actually respects you.
Trump said it himself: you can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion of its citizens. He’s just describing himself now.
His statement - “you can’t fight it, you have to go with it.” Sounds like something a rapist tells a woman. Yes, that's his mindset.
Thank you for the article, Adam . My neighbors have signs out NO DATA CENTERS. I have a sign coming to put out on my lawn. I listened to Rick Wilson’s podcast Against All Enemies he was speaking with Erin Brockovich . She is out being an advocate against these DATA CENTERS. The water would become bad, an air would get worse to breathe. Oligarch’s just want to destroy our country because of these DATA CENTERS.