Trump tells Americans not to ‘kill the golden goose’ rejecting voters’ turn against AI and data centers

Donald Trump is telling voters they’ve got the AI fight wrong. On Truth Social, he said the only “guardrails” AI needs are a “STRONG AND SMART” president, named Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and cast criticism of AI and data centers as a “SICK conspiracy.” He also warned that whoever wins AI wins, and said China would be the big winner if the U.S. slows down.

That argument runs straight into public opinion. A poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that 61% of Americans oppose a new data center in their community. Even 54% of Republicans do. Trump has been calling data centers the “Golden Goose,” and says communities that resist them will end up “backwards and poor” while the rest of the country gets jobs and investment.

The politics around that message look messy. Republicans head into November with only a razor-thin cushion in Congress, while Democrats need just three House seats to flip control and four Senate seats. Trump’s approval is near a low point for his presidency, and consumer sentiment has soured enough that even Republicans are feeling worse about the economy.

AI safety has also stopped being an inside-baseball argument. Amodei has urged the industry to “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed stronger safety measures, while OpenAI wants mandatory national requirements and Amodei wants independent evaluators, industry coordination, and more government oversight as models get more powerful. JD Vance has called the self-regulation push a “Trojan horse” for regulatory capture.

Wall Street noticed. Nvidia and other chipmakers fell more than 3% as investors weighed the chance that frontier labs could slow model development and the huge buildout that depends on it. Meta and Alphabet rose. Cybersecurity names like CrowdStrike climbed 15% or more. And all of it landed as the White House keeps moving deeper into the AI economy, from a June executive order on cyber benchmarks and “covered frontier models” to a deal that let Nvidia resume chip sales to China while the federal government took a share of the revenue.