On January 6th, 2021, Amy Kremer stood near the White House, urging Maga supporters to “Stop the Steal” of the election from Donald Trump. Now she is again rallying the president’s fans – this time to join a revolt against his pro-AI agenda.
“I’m not a sheep, I don’t just blindly follow,” Kremer, a former Tea Party activist who founded Women for Trump, told a crowd gathered for an AI data centre protest in West Virginia’s solidly Republican Berkeley County last week.
“I want conservatives and Republicans to know it’s okay to stand up and push back on this and speak out against it.”
Kremer, who was not involved in the January 6th, 2021, violence, is one of many Maga figures exasperated by the president’s decision to embrace an unpopular industry run by Silicon Valley elites. The Maga supporters say the products could destroy humanity.
RM Block
To the frustration of Republican strategists already facing an uphill battle in the midterm elections, Trump has, in recent weeks, derided those wanting to block data centre developments as “backwards and poor”, called AI safety fears – which polling shows are shared by almost two-thirds of US citizens – a “hoax”, and accused advocates of an AI slowdown of a “sick conspiracy” to help China.
His comments have been met with public dissent from former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has called AI “radioactive” and has joined forces with veteran socialist Bernie Sanders to demand a pause on the tech’s development.
“American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs any more,” Bannon said last week.
Behind the scenes, in the White House and beyond, there is further disquiet. In a leaked memo this month, first reported by Axios, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio warned candidates that “unqualified support for building more AI data centres is a losing position”, and cautioned campaigns against “treating local concerns as uninformed”.
Other strategists have warned Texas Republicans that the issue could cost the party a US Senate seat in November as Democrats increasingly tap voter anxiety about Big Tech.
Thanks in part to a flood of campaign ads by well-funded Super PACs (Political Action Committees), the issue is animating voters across political divides. In polling for the Financial Times by PF Global, 43 per cent of US citizens said they had seen either a television or online ad about data centres. More than a third had a conversation about the topic.
Yet, in the Oval Office, Trump has dug in his heels. When efforts to draft a global agreement on restricting AI development gained momentum in advance of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to the US this week, Trump quickly extinguished the initiative, saying his government “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control”.
Conservatives with concerns about the political cost of his AI stance have different theories to explain Trump’s anti-populist turn.
Some believe advisers such as Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former AI tsar David Sacks have too much influence on the president, crowding out critical voices. Trump has also become close to Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, who has played down AI safety fears, accused tech bosses of fearmongering and rejected calls for new AI laws.
“I think he has some bad people in his ear,” Kremer, now chair of Humans First, a non-profit that is organising a national AI Data Center Revolt bus tour, said of Trump.
“He’s not a techie. He doesn’t even send email. He only goes off what his advisers tell him ... and these people do not have the American people’s interests at heart.”
Others think the fragility of the US economy, now heavily reliant on AI growth as a bulwark against inflation triggered by Trump’s Iran war, is the catalyst.
The president, who was “usually in touch with his base ... is really worried about the financial impacts if we don’t continue down the path”, said Brendan Steinhauser, a former Tea Party activist and Republican strategist who runs the non-profit The Alliance for Secure AI.
“I understand those concerns, but he also should be worried about the national security concerns and the cybersecurity concerns that many of us have.”
But Republicans in tight races are breaking with Trump on technology. Mike Rogers, whom the president endorsed in Michigan’s pivotal US Senate race against progressive Abdul El-Sayed, last week said he believed “we must slow down development of AI” and called for “stricter protocols and guardrails” to protect US citizens.
In Texas, a state that lured data centre developers and was seen as politically safe for Big Tech, Trump’s favoured US Senate candidate Ken Paxton has pledged legislation to hold AI companies liable for child safety breaches, ban data centre construction on rural land and end tax breaks for them.
Ambitious Republican governors seen as contenders for the 2028 presidential race are also positioning themselves as AI critics.
Florida’s Ron DeSantis has tried to push through AI regulation against the White House’s wishes, while Texas’s Greg Abbott has said data centre developers got “the backlash they deserve”.
Even in deep-red West Virginia, local candidates are defying the president to save their own skin. In Berkeley County, where a $4 billion data centre is planned despite opposition, Republican Chris Anders is worried the issue will cost him his state legislature seat.
“I’m fighting for my life right now,” he said. “I supported the president in 2024; that doesn’t mean I’m in lockstep with him.”
Back in Washington, Steinhauser and others are trying to win over the president. Senior Trump officials, including Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, “get it”, Steinhauser said, “and they’re encouraging him to pursue policies that will put safeguards on AI”.
Some conservative activists want Bessent, who has previously highlighted the national security and financial risks posed by advanced AI, to become Trump’s new “AI tsar” to counterbalance Sacks and his allies.
A group of people have tried to make the matter personal for Trump, emphasising to him that his bank accounts and family fortune could disappear overnight if advanced AI hacked the financial system.
Conservative group Alliance for a Better Future (ABF) has given air cover to Michigan’s Rogers, running ads highlighting his AI proposals and commending his “courageous stand in support of commonsense guardrails”.
ABF plans to deploy “significant resources in key states in the coming weeks”, said a person familiar with its moves.
The White House said the president “always listened to a variety of opinions from a variety of subject-matter experts ... to inform his decision-making”.
Maintaining an “open line of communication with tech leaders ... is a major reason why America’s technological and innovative lead has widened since President Trump came into office”, it added.
Groups supporting the president’s stance have also been making themselves heard. Build American AI, an industry-aligned group indirectly funded by founders of OpenAI and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to promote data centres in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin. A PAC established with Sacks’s blessing, the Innovation Council (IC), is also spending to promote the president’s pro-AI agenda.
The IC said Trump “is exactly right that data centres, when done right, are transforming the towns that career politicians left for dead”.
“I do agree that the polling is troublesome, and perhaps some polls show that the [Republican Party] has a lot of work to do,” said Jordan Schachtel, an adviser to the IC. He said Trump was “courageous” in taking on the issue. “He’s speaking the truth that this will lead to a great era of innovation.”
Despite alarmingly frequent announcements of rogue AI agents – Australia on Wednesday revealed an OpenAI agent had hacked the nation’s health service – Schachtel says a Chinese “Sputnik moment” would change voters’ minds.
[ OpenAI ‘agent’ hacked Australian public health service websiteOpens in new window ]
“American people might say: ‘Hey, we want that too, or we want something better’,” he said.
But Kremer said she hopes Trump will heed his base’s calls for regulation long before that.
“I hope that he changes his position,” she said. “I know he will hear from the American people while he’s on the campaign trail. And I hope he comes our way.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
