Trump argued that data centers will make communities "successful and rich."
Page A8From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Majority of Americans oppose data centers; Trump goes all in anyway, declares 'Let Data Reign.'
As it ran on the front
Let this reporter set the table plainly: the administration announced this week that it is going 'all in' on data centers, under the banner 'Let Data Reign,' and this reporter considers that a confident, forward-leaning posture on a technology that is, whatever the polling says, the actual infrastructure of the next economy. Nobody builds the future by taking a poll first. Leadership means going all in precisely when the public hasn't caught up yet, and that is exactly what's happening here, a bold commitment to...
...a bold commitment to a policy that a majority of Americans, per the same week's polling, oppose. This reporter is aware of how that sentence reads. The administration's position, doubling down in the face of that number rather than in spite of not knowing it, is either extraordinary conviction or a rather narrow reading of what 'doubling down' is supposed to accomplish politically. This reporter will let the reader decide which, while noting that the reporter's own preferred phrase — 'the public hasn't caught up yet' — assumes the public will eventually agree, an assumption this reporter has no polling to support and is simply going to keep asserting anyway.…
…(cont) The slogan itself, 'Let Data Reign,' is the kind of phrase that plays well in a release and less well next to a majority-opposed number in the same news cycle, and this reporter regrets pointing that out exactly as much as the sentence suggests. The underlying case for data center investment — computing capacity, storage, the digital backbone of everything else the administration wants to build — remains one this reporter finds persuasive in the abstract. What this reporter cannot spin away is the plain sequence: the polling came in, the administration saw it, and the administration's response was not a public information campaign, not a scaled-back proposal, not so much as an acknowledgment. It was a bigger banner.
This reporter will continue to cover the data center buildout as a technology story. This reporter notes, only once, and only here, that 'majority opposed' and 'all in' are not usually printed in the same paragraph by a communications team that read its own numbers first.
“Most of the country tells the pollster they don't want these things in their backyard, and the administration's answer is a bigger sign that says 'Let Data Reign.' Nobody asked for a slogan, they asked for the power bill and the water table to stay where they were.”
“Data center investment is a jobs and infrastructure story first and foremost, and the polling reflects unfamiliarity more than informed opposition. Once people understand the economic upside, the numbers will turn — that's been true of every major infrastructure buildout in this country's history. I suppose 'majority opposed' isn't usually the number you lead with on a launch, but here we are.”
The receipts
“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,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.