Demonstrators march during a protest against artificial intelligence (AI) in San Francisco, California, USA, on Saturday, July 11, 2026.
Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The emerging coalition of religious leaders, labor unions and local activists concerned about artificial intelligence and the broader economic upheaval it brings poses a political problem for anyone on the wrong side of the issue. And President Donald Trump is the person most at risk.
The AI is right in his political blind spot. The industry and its rapidly evolving technology threaten to overwhelm Trump’s often uncanny ability to sense shifts in the political winds and could damage his party’s success in the midterm elections and the longer-term legacy he values.
Trump seems aware of the danger, but can’t help but rush toward it.
On Thursday, he pointed to a pledge by data center developers and utilities not to raise electricity prices, a nod to fears across the country that a surge in data center construction will drive up Americans’ energy bills. For companies like OpenAI, the promise is a given oraclegiving them political protection as the complex economics of changes to aging U.S. grids play out over years and decades.
But Trump couldn’t help but join the companies, even at an Environmental Protection Agency event centered on the pledge meant to show he cares about the little guy. He urged the assembled governors and other local officials to sell data centers to their constituents. “You can’t fight it. You have to participate,” he said.
Someone is going to get rich developing data centers, and it might as well be you, he told the audience. “If you don’t take all the money, someone else will take it. You might as well do it yourself.”
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Here’s the thing about getting rich. When Americans sense a chance that something could happen to them, they don’t have to be told twice to get behind it. For this reason, crypto and prediction markets are ideas that can’t be killed, no matter how unlikely it is that you personally will get really rich with them.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, however, ordinary Americans don’t believe Big Tech is handing them a golden lottery ticket. Trump can praise the stock market boom as often as he wants Nasdaq Composite has recorded 20 record deals this year – but too few Americans have enough of a stake in the market for rising stock prices of some select technology companies and the indexes that track them to overcome concerns about job instability and continued wealth concentration.
Namely that of Elon Musk SpaceX seemed like a great opportunity for those who could invest early. For those lucky enough to have a few dollars in a brokerage account during last month’s IPO, shares are down 30%.
And now, adding to AI’s class and wealth problems is a heavyweight political coalition that has influence over the voters Trump would most like to persuade.
The President Might Be Ready to Pope Leo But Trump can’t easily brush off the same language coming from the heart of the evangelical movement here in the US
Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, praised the pope’s warnings about AI. “There are positive benefits, but there are also extraordinary harms,” Kim said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
Kim feared that the importance of AI in healthcare, education and warfare could lead to humans being sidelined in our most important decisions.
“It is, as the pope described in his recent encyclical, the building of a Tower of Babel, the reliance on technology that reflects human hubris, that separates us not only from God but also from each other,” Kim said.
Kim’s evangelical group does not endorse candidates or threaten an open political campaign against Trump. But Kim’s message is a warning sign that things are changing, even among a voting bloc that has supported Trump since the start of his first presidential run.
Other groups seeking to win the favor of Trump and other Republican politicians are even more blunt. Republicans pushed for union support under Trump with mixed success. If they want to win the support of unions, they will increasingly have to take concerns about AI more seriously.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, made the point at the union convention last month.
“If you want to hold the highest office in the land, you should turn to all the candidates already out there running for president in 2028: Working people should come before the algorithms,” she said.
Shuler doesn’t claim to be against AI, but she wants the new technology to help more than the tech companies and their investors. So did Sean O’Brien, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “We’ve never had a seat at the table,” he said at a recent event with Palantir CEO Alex Karp organized by the center-right group American Compass.
Karp, who grew up in a union household, agreed: “I think the biggest challenge is that AI in this country is causing political unrest.”
The potential for this unrest is evident in the nationwide protests against data centers.
The liberal state of New York under Governor Kathy Hochul may have been the first to impose a moratorium on the construction of data centers. So far, however, the topic has not been polarized in the usual sense. A majority — 53% — of conservative Republicans oppose building on-site data centers, according to a June poll from the Yale Program on Climate Communication.
A majority of registered voters, 58%, shared this opposition to building a local data center, as did 74% of Liberal Democrats in the poll.
The religious right, labor unions and the broad coalition of local activists are all coming together to say: “A slower pace” on AI. The politicians who listen will find a strong outpouring of support.
Those who don’t? Well, Election Day in November is just 101 days away.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/trump-ai-data-center-backlash.html
