President Donald Trump urged governors and local officials to embrace AI data centers while touting commitments by data center developers and utilities not to raise electricity prices. He made the pitch Thursday at an Environmental Protection Agency event meant to show he was looking out for the little guy. The pitch was clean, polished, and very much top-down. The people expected to live with the consequences were told to trust the companies and the state apparatus that keeps them in line.
Trump told the audience, "You can't fight it. You have to go with it," and added, "If you don't take all that money, somebody else is going to take it. You might as well do it yourself." That’s the logic on offer: accept the machine, or watch someone else cash in. The line sounds less like public service than a sales pitch for corporate capture dressed up as inevitability.
Who Gets the Bill
The article says the pledge not to raise electricity prices is a no-brainer for companies such as OpenAI and Oracle, giving them political cover as the economics of changes to aging U.S. grids play out over years and decades. Trump aligned himself with the companies even at the EPA event on the pledge. The costs, meanwhile, don’t disappear. They get pushed down the chain, where ordinary people are left to absorb the strain of power-hungry infrastructure while executives and politicians talk about opportunity.
The push comes as religious leaders, labor unions and local activists are increasingly warning that artificial intelligence needs stronger government oversight and regulation. The emerging coalition worries about AI and the broader economic upheaval it could bring, and the article says that poses a political problem for anyone who gets on the wrong side of the issue. Trump is described as the person most at risk. The warning isn’t abstract. It’s rooted in fear of job instability, concentrated wealth, and a system that keeps handing the upside to a narrow few.
What People Are Saying
Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, praised Pope Leo XIV's warnings on AI and said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday, "There are positive benefits, but there are also extraordinary harms." Kim said AI's prominence in healthcare, education and warfare risks taking human beings out of the loop on the most important decisions. He also said, "It is, as the Pope described in his recent encyclical, the construction of a Tower of Babel, the trust in a technology that reflects human hubris, that not only disconnects us from God but disconnects us from each other."
That evangelical group doesn't endorse candidates and isn't threatening an overt political campaign against Trump, but the article says his message is a warning sign that the ground is shifting even among a voting bloc that has backed Trump since early in his first presidential run. The hierarchy is starting to feel the floor move under it. Not because the system got kinder, but because more people are seeing who gets protected and who gets sacrificed.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, said at the union's convention last month, "For all of those candidates who are already out there starting to run for president in 2028, if you want to hold the highest office in the land, hear these words: Working people should come before algorithms." Shuler doesn't claim to be anti-AI, but wants the new technology to help more than tech firms and their investors. That’s the basic demand, really. Not a miracle. Just a refusal to let workers be treated like collateral damage in someone else’s profit scheme.
Sean O'Brien, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024, said at a recent event with Palantir CEO Alex Karp organized by the center-right group American Compass, "We've never had a seat at the table." Karp, who grew up in a union household, said, "I think the biggest challenge to AI in this country is political unrest." That line hangs there with a kind of accidental honesty. When people are shut out long enough, unrest starts to look less like a threat and more like a consequence.
The Pushback Is Already Here
The article says the potential for unrest is clear in the nationwide rumbling against data centers. It says liberal New York state has moved first to impose a moratorium on building data centers under Gov. Kathy Hochul, but the issue isn't polarized along familiar lines. A June poll by the Yale Program on Climate Communication showed that 53% of conservative Republicans oppose building data centers locally, 58% of registered voters share that opposition, and 74% of liberal Democrats oppose local data center construction. That’s not a fringe complaint. It’s a broad refusal from people who don’t want their towns turned into sacrifice zones for the next round of tech expansion.
The article says Americans are not buying the idea that Big Tech is handing them a golden lottery ticket. It notes that Trump can tout the stock market boom, and says the Nasdaq composite has had 20 record closes this year, but too few Americans have enough of a stake in the market for rising share prices of a select few tech companies and the indexes that contain them to overcome worries about job instability and the continuing concentration of wealth. The winners are counted in record closes. The losers are counted in insecurity.
It also says Elon Musk's SpaceX looked like a great opportunity for those able to invest early, but that for those regular Joes fortunate enough to have a few bucks in a brokerage account during its IPO last month, shares are down 30%. That’s the promise of the market in miniature: a few get in early, many get burned, and the rest are told to clap for innovation.
The article says Trump may be willing to write off Pope Leo XIV, who issued an influential encyclical in May warning that AI needed guardrails to protect humanity, but he can't so easily dismiss the same language when it comes from the heart of the evangelical movement in the U.S. The religious right, labor unions and the broad coalition of local activists are coming together to say, "slow down" on AI. Politicians who listen will find a powerful groundswell of support behind them, and those who don't face Election Day in November, which is 101 days away. The calendar keeps moving. So does the pressure from below.