Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Trump Tells Towns That Fight Data Centers They'll End Up 'Backwards and Poor' — His Own Vice President Says It's About the Electric Bill

Transcript

Trump Tells Towns That Fight Data Centers They'll End Up 'Backwards and Poor' — His Own Vice President Says It's About the Electric Bill · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the White House argued with itself and lost. The New York Times reported Monday that President Trump told American towns fighting data centers they must want to end up, in his words, backwards and poor.
• 0:15
  [Guest] On Truth Social he called data centers a golden goose, said China could not be happier with the backlash, and finished with two words. Let Data Reign.
• 0:25
  [Host] Who is he actually arguing with?
• 0:27
  [Guest] His own Vice President. The same afternoon, JD Vance told reporters that ninety-nine percent of the backlash comes from places where a data center means higher utility and electricity prices for the people on the ground.
• 0:39
  [Host] That is not you are backwards. That is you read your bill correctly.
• 0:44
  [Guest] He went further. Build a data center, Vance said, and you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out.
• 0:52
  [Host] The post was not only about towns being poor. Trump said the backlash is a gift to Beijing, and the electric bill does not answer that.
• 1:01
  [Guest] It does not, and it is the strongest thing in the post. It is also not what his own administration told those companies in March.
• 1:10
  [Host] Which was?
• 1:11
  [Guest] Seven companies signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at the White House. Build or buy the generation their data centers need, and pay the full cost of the wires to connect it. It is nonbinding.
• 1:23
  [Host] So in March he agreed the electric bill was the problem. In August he told the people saying so that they want to be poor.
• 1:32
  [Guest] Same building, same man, one summer apart.
• 1:34
  [Host] How many people are we talking about?
• 1:37
  [Guest] Gallup surveyed Americans in March. Seventy-one percent said they would oppose a data center built in their area.
• 1:43
  [Host] Is that a lot? People say no to everything.
• 1:46
  [Guest] In the same survey, fifty-three percent said no to a nuclear plant nearby.
• 1:51
  [Host] So a building full of servers is less welcome in an American town than a reactor.
• 1:57
  [Guest] And the objection is arithmetic. PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, buys its power supply years ahead at auction, and its independent market monitor traced nine point three billion dollars of one auction's cost to data center demand.
• 2:11
  [Host] Traced to whose bill?
• 2:12
  [Guest] Everyone on that grid. Thirteen states, Illinois out to New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Virginia in the middle. If you live there, you have already paid your share.
• 2:23
  [Host] Ohio is also where the Senate race is.
• 2:25
  [Guest] Sherrod Brown has made data centers the centerpiece against Jon Husted, calling him the face of data centers in Ohio. A Republican Senate campaign memo leaked to Axios in August calls it a sleeper issue for the entire cycle.
• 2:39
  [Host] And the President's answer to his own party's memo was that you will be backwards and poor.
• 2:45
  [Guest] The ad tracker AdImpact finds every congressional and governor's ad this cycle that mentions data centers runs against them. Not most of them, every single one.
• 2:54
  [Host] So do what Vance said. Make them build their own power. Problem solved.
• 2:59
  [Guest] That is the trap. A campus on its own gas turbines is not on your bill, but it is not paying for the poles and substations either. The strongest customer walks off the shared system, and the cost of holding that system up falls on a smaller, poorer pool.
• 3:16
  [Host] So the town gets a zoning board, and the company gets its own power plant.
• 3:22
  [Guest] And the grid it left still gets paid for by whoever could not leave.
• 3:27
  [Host] Patrick Deglon calls that move forking in Unscarcity, walking away from a captured system instead of fighting it, and he wrote it as a defense of the weak against the strong.
• 3:38
  [Guest] On the American grid, the strong got there first. For more on who pays for AI's electricity and who really vetoes the buildout, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.