Molly McCann Sanders has a lot in common with many of the other women who helped Donald Trump win a second term. She is a pro-life Catholic who lives in Texas, holds staunchly conservative opinions on immigration, and has a fierce hatred of eminent domain—the practice of government taking private property for public use. She also carries the political DNA of Phyllis Schlafly, since she is president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, the conservative organization Schlafly founded decades ago. In many ways, she is exactly the kind of person you would expect to be an enthusiastic Trumper. And she is. She loves Trump, she says. But when she thinks about the sprawling data centers that have come to symbolize the AI boom, something shifts. Sanders describes herself as “a crunchy MAHA mom”—a member of the Make America Healthy Again movement, with its profound suspicion of chemicals, processed food, and corporate pollution. She is alarmed by “the idea that these data centers can move in and pollute.” She admits she is not a data-center expert or a tech expert, but she is “suspicious and wary, and want[s] to move slowly.” Most importantly, she says of Trump: “I think he’s wrong about data centers.” That sentence is a small political earthquake. It reveals that the coalition Trump assembled is not monolithic. The same conservative women who supported him now worry that his enthusiasm for the “laptop class” and for artificial intelligence is trampling their values. Their discomfort is not about Silicon Valley culture wars in the abstract. It is about concrete, ground-level questions: who gets to decide what a community looks like, who gets to breathe the air and drink the water, and whether private property still means anything when the government wants a tax base. For years, the cultural dividing line in America seemed to run between coastal liberals and heartland conservatives. Data centers have scrambled that line. On one side sits Washington and a bipartisan consensus that the country must build fast to win the AI race. On the other side sit local residents, many of them just as conservative as Sanders, watching enormous warehouses rise next to their farmland, schools, and subdivisions. They are told these facilities are modern marvels. They see generators, transmission lines, and cooling towers. They hear promises of jobs and tax revenue, but they also hear about water shortages and the quiet hum of machines that never sleep.
Sanders is not alone in her doubts. According to a New York Times poll released last week, more than 60 percent of Americans say they oppose the construction of data centers, including 47 percent of Republicans. That is a stunning number in a party whose base is usually eager to celebrate free-market development. The data-center backlash has become broad and bipartisan, fueled by complaints about noise, water use, electricity demand, diesel backup generators, finite land, and the use of eminent domain to force people off their property. Pollsters and party strategists have taken notice. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies warning that “campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” That sentence was an extraordinary admission: the party that controls Washington and views Silicon Valley as a useful ally in the competition against China suddenly realized that its own voters hate the physical manifestation of that alliance. Days later, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio sent his own memo to Republican candidates, telling them that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.” These are not progressive activists speaking. These are the metrics people, the operatives who read focus groups and poll cross-tabs. They saw the same thing Sanders felt: a wellspring of organic anger that does not fit neatly into the left-right binary. In communities across the country, the data center is becoming what the pipeline was a decade ago—a symbol of outside interests using political power to override local people. And for many Republicans, that contradiction is unbearable. They are supposed to believe in property rights, in limited government, in the dignity of ordinary Americans. Yet here is their own party, in alliance with some of the richest corporations on Earth, trying to manufacture a consensus that a giant concrete box consuming millions of gallons of water is something a community should be grateful for.
The GOP’s dilemma is that Trump himself is not listening. Facing mounting scrutiny over his administration’s embrace of AI and data centers, Trump has doubled down. In late August, he wrote on Truth Social that only communities that wanted to be “backwards and poor” would refuse data centers coming to town. The insult was aimed at holdouts, but it landed on his own supporters. Then, last week, he issued another series of posts boosting AI data centers. The responses on his own platform were furious. An analysis by The New York Times of thousands of Truth Social replies found that anti-data-center and anti-AI comments—including from staunch MAGA accounts—outnumbered positive comments by four to one. That ratio is almost a mirror of what conservative politicians are hearing in their districts. Sanders says she sometimes “looks past” the wilder things Trump says, but she cannot overlook this. “That is not the right way to go about this,” she says of the “backwards and poor” post. “We do have legitimate concerns. There are real problems.” Her words are careful, gracious, and pointed. She does not want to break with the president. She is not staging a protest. But she is drawing a line in the soil, somewhere in the Texas ground that she worries will be paved over for yet another windowless building full of humming servers. In her view, calling legitimate concerns “backwards” is exactly the kind of elite contempt that pushed many people to vote for Trump in the first place. To see Trump using those same sneers against his own grassroots is confusing and painful for voters like her.
Why is Trump so committed to data centers? His allies say it is about the global race for artificial intelligence. My colleague Hugo Lowell, who covers the White House, says Trump has been told that data-center development is “compute,” and that restricting compute means the United States loses to China. The C-word—China—is the trump card. It is echoed publicly by a group of tech accelerationists and White House allies, including former Trump administration AI czar David Sacks and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. At the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, Lonsdale appeared at an auxiliary event to debate Joe Allen, Steve Bannon’s tech editor, about the future of data centers and AI. Sanders recalls that this conversation was the only time data centers came up at the entire convention. That is a strange outcome for an issue that is supposedly central to the GOP’s national-security agenda. It is even stranger given the near-universal opposition data centers have inspired among voters. The party’s leadership seems to be caught between two worlds: a tech-friendly “laptop class” of young men with libertarian instincts and a grassroots base of older, more culturally conservative voters who want to protect their homes and land. The convention’s courtship of the laptop class was, in Sanders’s words, a “huge misstep” with midterms nearing. The debate stage may have been filled with candidates eager to talk about AI dominance, but the parking lots and hotel lobbies were filled with people who wanted to know why their county was giving away water and tax dollars to Amazon Web Services. They were not asking because they were technophobes. They were asking because they had been through it before—promises of jobs, promises of regeneration, promises that the noise would be minimal and the lights would stay on. Then the trucks showed up. Then the construction crews arrived. Then the tax abatements were signed. And the locals were left with the dust, the traffic, and the feeling that they had been outvoted by people who would never have to live next to the result.
To understand Sanders’s position, it helps to look at the ideological strands she has woven together. The Eagle Forum has long stood for traditional values, states’ rights, and opposition to federal overreach. Phyllis Schlafly was a fierce defender of the American family, and her political offspring have grown suspicious of corporate power as much as government power. That suspicion now extends to the technology industry. Sanders’s “crunchy MAHA mom” identity adds another layer. The Make America Healthy Again movement, which has found a home in Trump’s orbit, draws heavily on concerns about what is in the water, the soil, and the food. It is only a small step from worrying about pesticides and seed oils to worrying about massive concrete slabs, diesel exhaust, and cooling towers. Data centers, in this framework, are not just buildings. They are environmental threats, and they are also property-rights threats. The phrase “eminent domain” is a trigger for her, a reminder that the government can take private property for public use—or, more precisely, for corporate use. She does not want the tech industry to be canceled; she wants it to be slowed down, forced to answer questions, and made to prove that it will not destroy the communities it claims to serve. “I’m not a data center expert,” she repeats, but she knows what she sees. Her concerns are concrete: pollution, congestion, noise, and the feeling that local people have no say. That last point is perhaps the most important. Sanders is wary of decisions being made by “laptop class” elites in faraway offices. She wants local governments, school boards, county commissions, and neighbors to have a real voice in what gets built. She wants “to move slowly.” That is not a radical demand. In another era, it would have been called conservatism.
The conflict Sanders represents is not going away. As the midterms approach, Republicans are beginning to understand that they cannot simply run as the party of AI and data centers. The private memos from the NRSC and Tony Fabrizio show that the party’s own data infrastructure is lousy with warnings. Trump, however, remains the leader, and he is not easily moved. His political model depends on intensity, loyalty, and the willingness of base voters to forgive him. Sanders is a perfect example of that loyalty. She loves Trump, she says. She looks past his excesses. But this time, she cannot quite get past what he says about data centers. She believes there are real problems—not invented ones, not “backwards” local concerns, but real issues of pollution, property, and democracy. The GOP’s attempt to court young male tech enthusiasts at the convention felt to her like a betrayal of the people who actually show up at county meetings and knock on doors. The party now faces a strange inversion: the modern economy’s most symbolically powerful industry, AI, is colliding with the modern conservative movement’s oldest instincts, which are anti-corporate, anti-elite, and pro-local. For decades, the right taught that federal power was the danger. Now data centers arrive with the blessing of the federal government, with tax incentives and security arguments, and local conservatives are expected to welcome them. But they do not. They see the future, and they are not sure it belongs to them. Sanders, for her part, remains a foot soldier in the culture wars—she wants America to win, but she wants to win for the people who live there, not for the machines. Her hesitation is a warning to every Republican candidate running in 2026: the data-center fight is no longer just a tech policy debate. It is a question of who owns the country. And if Trump keeps calling his own people “backwards and poor,” he may end up losing the one thing he can never afford to lose: his own base.
