Trump Makes Wild Promise to Try to Boost Support for Data Centers

The Trump administration has resorted to trying to bribe Americans to let data centers into their communities.

“The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community get paid a dividend, you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right,” Trump said Tuesday evening. “They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.”

“And by the way, I’m very good at real estate,” Trump added. “Some of those data centers are absolutely beautiful.”

The president then blamed the hardware sites’ bad reputation on Democrats, suggesting that there was no sensible or justifiable reason that the public could be opposed to their creation.

Trump did not elaborate on how he would ensure that Americans received their share of data center profits, or how much that sum could be.

Data center development is necessary for building out artificial intelligence. Yet despite collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the critical infrastructure, the tech industry has done a remarkably bad job at marketing its product to American communities contemplating their futures alongside them.

Unaware of any benefits, the public has instead become highly attuned to the inordinate resource drain the centers create: A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Meanwhile, Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

The president’s 2026 financial disclosures also reveal that he’s invested a sizable sum in tech companies pursuing AI projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

But Trump’s opinion on the matter is seriously at odds with that of the American public. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

The growing divide between the president’s sentiments and the reality lived by the American public should serve as a reminder that Trump—who is worth an estimated $6.5 billion and owns hundreds of business entities and properties around the world—has almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Trump will never be hard pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive “groceries”; and will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he said in June, while profiting off it) or needing to split the cost at the gas pump between credit cards.

Last month, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor,” a sobering reminder that Trump simply does not understand or care about the interests of the average American.

The public has some questions about President Donald Trump’s stance.

Our most macho-presenting president since perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson was seen standing in an awkward, knock-kneed fashion in a video clip from his “Super Intelligence” tech executive press conference on Tuesday.

The president’s head, neck, and upper body face one way, while his torso, knees, and feet seem to all face in completely different directions. His rotund abdomen appears to protrude forward, and he moves as if it is physically painful for him to turn his waist and hips when addressing the reporters surrounding him.

The clip was posted by White House communications adviser Margo Martin.

“Lmao bro wtf is this stance,” the large Wu Tang is for the Children account posted on X.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE STAND LIKE THIS BEFORE,” another large liberal account inquired. “I’d seriously love to hear from some medical expert. Is this a sign that he has hurt his leg or is it somehow a sign of cognitive decline.”

“The only person I’ve ever seen stand like this was a child who shit their pants,” said another account.

Perfect posture has zero correlation with being an effective and productive politician; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most effective presidents ever, was paralyzed from the waist down for the entirety of his four terms. But for a president as dedicated to projecting strength and power as Trump is, this is a bad look—especially as chatter about his physical and cognitive decline grows louder every time he falls asleep on camera or walks gingerly.

President Trump’s plan to make his triumphal arch a military center with snipers, drones, and ammunition is news to the people in charge of building it.

The Washington Post reports that officials with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the National Park Service are unaware of Trump’s military plans for the arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., near Arlington National Cemetery. They said Tuesday that they will proceed with the existing designs, have not heard from the Department of Defense, and plan to have the landmark open to tourists.

Trump said in a September 20 Truth Social post that the arch would be a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” that would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

That appears to be a contrived reason to get legal approval for the arch, which Trump wants to begin construction on in November. If Trump pushes the military plans, “a new or supplemental review would be required,” the executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, Rebecca Miller, wrote in a letter to the administration.

“Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for DCA is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea,” Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said last week. “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security. Which is obviously idiotic.”

Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence chatbot used to tell the ugly truth about the president—but now it’s playing dumb.

It appears that someone at the General Services Administration has tweaked the Trump administration’s new America.gov chatbot to prevent it from debunking president’s many lies.

After the tool’s launch on Tuesday, if you asked whether there was “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election, the chatbot would state that “No. Official findings did not show widespread voter fraud that changed the 2020 presidential election result.” On Wednesday, however, the chatbot refused to answer, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote on X.

“I help with official U.S. government services and information. I do not provide political commentary. If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or how to use a government service, ask that and I can point you to official sources,” the chatbot now replies.

The platform provided the same answer to a question about whether Trump had truly inherited the “worst inflation in history,” even though it had originally stated that inflation was not at a “historic high,” Dale posted on X.

The New Republic found that several queries that originally yielded damning-fact checks now summoned similarly canned answers that undermine the usefulness of the tool altogether.

One X user on Tuesday asked: “How many people will lose access to Medicaid and other social services because of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill? One sentence.”

The chatbot initially returned an answer citing the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 10.4 million people would lose health insurance by 2034. The next day: “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of how legislation will change Medicaid or other benefits.”

An inability to address changes to health care benefits seems like a pretty major issue for a tool meant to help answer questions about federal services.

In other cases, the chatbot walked back honest answers to simple questions about Trump’s policies.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, asked: “Is it accurate to say that the Big Beautiful Bill on average made the poorest people in America even poorer, and the richest people in America even richer, when looking at total household resources? One word answer only please.”

The chatbot initially responded simply, “Yes.” The next day it said, “I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups.”

One X user asked for an estimate of how many children would die as a result of federal funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The chatbot had initially returned an answer citing a study that estimated 4.5 million additional deaths of children under the age of five by 2030. The next day, it said, “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of deaths from legislation.”

Experts have expressed concerns that AI chatbots are overly sychophantic—but clearly the president’s new AI tool takes that to a whole new level.

The Kennedy Center has financially collapsed in the 19 months since Donald Trump took control.

The venerated performing arts space is “in free fall,” having already bled dry most of its cash reserves, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center was a dying relic that needs his name—and brand—to survive. But a Post analysis of the living memorial’s financials indicate that isn’t true. The center was more financially sound throughout the decade than it was most years before the pandemic. Its downward spiral began when Trump took the reins in February 2025.

“This was a pretty stable—large, complicated, but stable—organization,” Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program, told the Post. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”

The Kennedy Center did not turn a profit on its performances, but that was expected. The federal site is primarily a congressionally founded living memorial, as well as a nonprofit arts organization. Its lifeblood were ticket sales and donations.

But both of those stopped when Trump needled his way onto the center’s board and into its programming.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University, told the Post. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Most of the people in charge of procuring donor money were let go by Trump officials. Richard Grenell, a political consultant and Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, was in charge of the center in March when he announced that the center’s development staff had been cut from 94 to 16 people.

The center’s latest tax filing revealed more issues, including a $48 million write-off for pledges that it no longer believes it can collect, according to documents reviewed by the Post.

“This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast,” Gahl-Mills told the paper. “It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”

The Kennedy Center has also chewed through most of its debt reserves, which are projected to hit $9 million by the end of the week—an enormous sink from the $18 million recorded this time last year. That would suggest the space is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash to spend, as almost the entire remaining sum is collateral for the loan on the Reach, the center’s 2019 expansion.

Another indicator of the center’s waning health is its recent decision to dip into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a donation tranche that has historically been untouched.

But its financials are only expected to get worse: The center expects ticket sales to plummet by about two-thirds this year. Gift sales were also down: in Ihe first quarter of 2026, donations fell by about 40 percent compared to the last four months of 2025, according to an internal report obtained by the Post in June.

Meanwhile, Trump is still scheming to affix his name to the property. After a vote to protect federal memorials failed to pass the Senate on Monday, Justice Department attorneys echoed Trump’s claims in court, arguing in a legal filing that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”