Donald Trump has a message for voters: they’re wrong. And he has a solution for the AI doomsday panic: just trust him, bro.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name while warning of a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” he added, arguing that China would be the primary winner of an AI slowdown.Trump also warned Americans not to “kill the Golden Goose,” the term he has used to refer to AI data centers. The president has argued that communities which try to resist the servers would end up “backwards and poor” while the rest of the country will reap the benefits of the extra jobs and added investment. The trouble for Trump is that some 61% of Americans oppose a new data center in their community, along with 54% of Republicans, according to a poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
It’s one of a crop of issues where MAGA world finds itself on the wrong side of public opinion as they stare down the midterms that could see them lose control of Congress. One such issue is the Iran War, which only a quarter of Americans support and has driven gas prices up 44% since the war began in February. Another is surveillance. Trump recently said he liked Flock cameras, the rapidly expanding network of always-on automated license plate readers used by police, which Americans have turned against. Nearly 46% of Americans oppose Flock-style cameras in their neighborhoods, as opposed to 38% which support. With his statements on AI, Trump is pulling off a rather remarkable unpopularity trifecta.
