President Donald Trump on Monday warned Americans that they risk becoming "backwards and poor" unless they allow Big Tech companies to build artificial intelligence data centers in their communities. In a social media post , the president…
Page A5From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Trump warns towns refusing AI data centers will stay 'backwards and poor,' then declares 'Let Data Reign.'
As it ran on the front
Here's the pitch: build us a data center — the water bill's yours, the noise is yours, the tax break's ours — and if you say no, you're 'backwards and poor.' That's not an argument, that's an insult with a deadline. Notice the grammar. Nobody says 'communities that decline may see reduced investment.' They say backwards. They say poor. Two words built to make a town council feel embarrassed into a permit.
Then, same week, the slogan: 'Let Data Reign.' Reign — like a king, like a thing that rules you instead of a thing you rent server space to. You don't get 'let data reign' pitched to you when you're the customer. You get that pitched when you're the subject. The data doesn't work for the town. The town works for the data — cools it, powers it, pays for the substation upgrade, and gets to watch the ribbon-cutting.…
…(cont) This is the same move every time, just with new vocabulary. Reject the ballpark, you hate jobs. Reject the pipeline, you hate energy independence. Reject the data center, now you're 'backwards.' The word changes, the ask never does: give us your land, your water, your grid capacity, and be grateful we picked you, because the alternative — according to the man doing the picking — is poverty. That's not a warning about the future. That's a sales technique. You've heard it from a landlord, from a boss, from a guy at a folding table with a clipboard. 'Sign here or lose the spot' is not economic forecasting, it's pressure, dressed up in a podium and a seal.
And notice what's never on the table: the town gets a say in the water allocation, the town gets a cut of the power savings, the town gets a union job guarantee instead of forty construction jobs and six permanent ones running a building full of GPUs. None of that's the offer. The offer is: take it, or we'll say your name next to the word poor on the news. That's not 'let data reign.' That's let data collect.
“They're not asking towns to host a data center, they're telling them: take the noise, the water draw, the tax break, or stay poor — that's not policy, that's a protection racket with a keynote slide. 'Let Data Reign' is the bumper-sticker version of 'pay up or get left behind.'”
“Look, the President is simply stating an economic reality — regions that embrace next-generation infrastructure tend to see growth, regions that don't, tend not to. That's not a threat, that's a market outcome, and 'Let Data Reign' is a rallying phrase, not a — actually, calling refusal 'backwards and poor' is doing a lot of the threatening, I'll grant that.”
The receipts
Trump argued that data centers will make communities "successful and rich."
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.