With their control of Congress in jeopardy ahead of November’s midterm elections, vulnerable Republicans would surely love—and certainly are looking for—a boost from President Trump. He could end his global trade war in an instant, and perhaps bring down skyrocketing prices on a wide range of consumer goods. The war in Iran that he foolishly launched in late February—and which has caused energy prices to explode—would perhaps take a little longer to wind down, but its end would almost certainly benefit the GOP’s increasingly slim odds this fall.
But that is not what Trump is doing. Instead, he’s posting stuff like this:
There is tough competition, but surely this is one of Trump’s most ridiculous social media posts, ever. Even many of his most loyal supporters would probably blanch at his description of himself as the nation’s preeminent “Hoax Buster.” And few, if any, Americans are worried that runaway AI will lead to a Terminator-like situation where killer robots rove our streets. But people are worried about artificial intelligence: A recent University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation found that roughly 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans backed a federal agency to regulate AI and mandated safety tests for AI programming. That’s about as bipartisan as any issue gets—and Trump is on the wrong side of it, insisting instead that the only AI guardrail the U.S. needs is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” (There’s nothing quite like the all-caps bluster of a painfully insecure president to put everyone at ease.)
It’s not just AI, either, where Trump is out of step with the country. He has also repeatedly backed data centers, which are increasingly unpopular in local, state, and national politics and in a similarly bipartisan fashion. “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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. “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.” The problem is that, once again, a lot of Americans want to kill, or at least cage, that Golden Goose—and Trump’s protestations don’t seem to be making much of a difference. A July poll from Politico found that support for data centers among Trump voters has fallen 11 points in just six months and now stands at a paltry 34 percent.
Trump’s much-vaunted—if somewhat overrated—political instincts have corroded. Whether it’s age or his lame-duck status or the fact that he’s fixated on interior decorating in the White House and architectural projects around Washington, it’s clear that he’s lost more than a step in his second term. And that’s a gift for Democrats in more ways than one.
Trump’s choice to flout public opinion is perhaps not so difficult to understand. His tariffs and Iran war are straining the economy, and the stock market’s bull run in recent years has been largely driven by the so-called Magnificent 7 tech stocks that comprise about a third of the S&P 500’s total value—hence his vocal backing for AI and the data centers on which it relies. “Trump is married to data centers no matter what because it’s the only real job creator,” one former Trump administration official told Politico earlier this month.
The economy needs AI, and Trump needs the economy, which means he needs AI thanks in large part to damage he has inflicted on the economy via tariffs and the war in Iran. Still, while Trump has taken many divisive stances, it’s rare for him to take a stand that’s so unpopular across the political spectrum. His immigration stance, for example, had broad support among Republicans before he even declared his political candidacy, though it has proven less so among Democrats and many independents. Here, he’s really out on an island. And we’re seeing the limits of his abilities to shape public opinion.
It’s possible, of course, that those abilities have always been limited. His strict immigration position was controversial but popular among Republican voters before his 2016 presidential campaign. And his knack for marketing and messaging may have always been overrated.
For instance, Trump was never really that great at nicknames. For every “Little Marco” there were several like “Al Frankenstein” or “1 for 38 Kasich.” Shallow political analysts thrilled to these jibes—one labeled him the “Michael Jordan of nicknames” in a piece that gushed over “Little Rocket Man,” Trump’s moniker for the nuclear arsenal–possessing Kim Jong Un—but they were, more often than not, unimaginative and unworthy even of a schoolyard taunt.
Still, the nicknames did tend to at least distill something about the person he was describing (Rubio was weak, Franken was weird, Kasich was a loser) that was easy to compute among his audience: Republican voters favored him to Rubio and Kasich and were predisposed to dislike Al Franken, a Democrat. Trump has certainly made Republicans more in favor of corruption and law-breaking, but has seen GOP support for his war in Iran and tariffs—which were never especially popular to begin with—drop in recent months. With data centers and AI, he’s starting with a deficit that he doesn’t seem able to surmount.
The biggest surprise here is that Trump is willing to go out on such a limb on the issue. He certainly didn’t take any similar stand in his first term, one that was so at odds with the views of even his core supporters. That he’s doing so is a testament, certainly, to just how badly he has screwed up the economy, which is now perversely dependent on technologies that a clear majority of Americans are either skeptical of or outright loathe. But it also reveals that the president is, at 80 years old, more out of touch with his base than ever. Or put more simply, Trump is now plainly bad at politics.
The big winner here, obviously, is the Democrats. Trump’s unpopular stances are not just a political boost that could turn a blue wave into a tsunami; they also give cover to Democrats as they figure out where to stand on AI and data centers. The party has failed to articulate a clear position, as it’s seemingly torn between the potential for job creation, the party’s fraying but still present ties to Silicon Valley, and the public’s growing anger toward the tech giants. While some Democrats—mostly progressives and populists—have called for moratoriums on data center construction, the party’s leaders largely haven’t followed suit. Ordinarily that messaging incoherence would pose a political problem. But it isn’t, for now, thanks to the Hoax Buster in the White House.
