There is a version of the data center fight that conservatives are about to lose by winning. Across the country, the Right is discovering it can beat data centers at the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate for governor is…
Page B2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Republicans' data-center prize turns out to be bigger government; Ozempic — not Trump — lowered drug prices.
As it ran on the front
DIED, this week, quietly, without a service: the idea that the party currently in power intended to shrink government, and alongside it, the promise that the man currently in office would be the one who lowered your drug prices.
The first was born sometime around a platform plank nobody reads closely, raised on decades of speeches about federal overreach, and it made it, by the papers' own accounting, all the way to a fight over data centers — a fight its own side described, in print, as won, with the prize being more government, not less. That's the whole obituary right there. You don't get a franker eulogy than a winner announcing the trophy is the thing you spent forty years saying you hated.…
…(cont) The second was younger, born on a campaign promise about drug prices coming down under this administration, survived, as it turns out, by the actual drug price reduction, which arrived anyway, care of a pharmaceutical company's weight-loss drug, no thanks owed to the man who took credit for standing near it.
Both are survived by their press releases, which remain in circulation and will outlive the ideas that authorized them, the way an obituary sometimes runs longer than the deceased managed to live. Preceded in death, in both cases, by the assumption that a party's stated principle and a party's actual conduct were ever scheduled to meet.
This is not shocking, and this desk does not report it as shocking. Government got bigger where it was profitable to make it bigger. Prices got lower where a company found it profitable to lower them. The rest was bunk, dressed up for a podium, and every whippersnapper who believed the podium is owed a small apology this week, quietly, the way this paper owes them one every week there's an obituary in this slot.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the platform next to the invoice, once, before the next election, and notice which one changed.
“They ran on shrinking government and drug prices, and delivered bigger government and a diabetes drug company doing their job for them. Read the fine print and the promise was never the plan, the plan was always somebody else picks up the bill.”
“Winning the data center race means broader government partnership, which is not the same as big government, it's — actually functionally it is the same as big government, but strategically necessary big government, which is different, I believe.”
The receipts
After decades of prescription drug prices rising faster than inflation, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered some rare positive headlines on affordability. In 2025, prescription drug prices fell by an average of more than…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.