House Republican pushes back on Trump data center support: ‘I guess I’m backwards and poor’

GOP Rep. Tim Burchett (Tenn.) responded on Monday to President Trump’s statement that communities that oppose data center construction want to “ end up being backwards and poor .”

“I guess I’m backwards and poor,” he told MeidasTouch’s Pablo Manríquez on the House steps.

The Tennessee Republican suggested data centers could be built in military installations instead of in communities.

“We need more local control. We should have brought everybody to the table,” he added.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, the president encouraged Americans to welcome data center projects and “let Data Reign.”

“The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them,” he wrote. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” he added.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) also suggested China was behind the growing skepticism about data centers in America.

“This is a competition with China. Let’s be clear about this,” Scalise told Fox News on Tuesday.

He added that the GOP is “investigating whether China is behind a lot of this misinformation, false information against data centers.”

In a Fox News poll conducted last month, 70 percent of respondents expressed opposition to the construction of a data center in their area, including 60 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats. Critics of these projects cite environmental and financial strains on the communities they are built in.

Some Republican state leaders have come out in favor of placing additional guardrails on data centers.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who had previously declared his state as the “epicenter of AI development,” recently issued a moratorium on new data center construction over concerns about water usage and power grid strains.

In an interview with ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, Abbott defended his reversal on this issue.

“They pop up in places that nobody ever heard of before, until they started the construction,” the Republican governor said. “And so, they had not been working in collaboration with the state, they’d not been in collaboration with local governments, and so they basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), a frequent critic of the president and his administration’s policies, accused the companies behind data center projects of being “insensitive” in their placement.

“I don’t think you should let data reign without any kind of regulation at the local level,” he told Fox News. “You definitely need to let local people decide these things.”