Trump calls data centers Ohio's job savior in the county that just cut 1,400.

As it ran on the front

Vandalia keeps two ledgers on the same page this week, and they do not square. On Saturday night the president stood in that stretch of southwestern Ohio for Jon Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy and told the crowd there is so much money to be made for Ohio, that you can't just turn off a data center, that if Ohio refuses one it goes to China. That is the deposit column. The withdrawal column, filed this week by the New York Post, carries the number 1,400 — the workers laid off from the Navistar truck factory in the same stretch of southwestern Ohio where the president was standing to ask for votes. The filing and the applause arrived close enough together that a skimmer could mistake one for an answer to the other. It is not. The rally is for two Senate and governor candidates; the layoff ledger does not carry either of their names, or his.

Run the data-center line against the president's own filings and the gap gets wider. In August he told Americans on social media that any community that turns away a data center risks ending up "backwards and poor" — the same frame he brought to Vandalia, money too large to refuse. Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican, read that filing back to a reporter on the House steps: "I guess I'm backwards and poor." Weeks later, Palm Beach County — the county that files the president's own home address — voted 6 to 0 for a one-year moratorium on data centers over fifty megawatts, the same technology Ohio was told it could not afford to turn down. The commissioners who cast that vote do not run in Ohio's midterms.…