Donald Trump’s AI push fuels revolt in Maga heartlands
Republicans fear backlash against White House agenda could undermine support in this year’s midterm elections
On a cold Tuesday evening last week, about 200 Missourians crammed into a Methodist church to share a message: The AI revolution embraced by Donald Trump’s White House does not have their unqualified support.
“I voted for this administration and didn’t really think about [AI] until it started to affect me,” said Lisa Garrett, who lives beside the site of a rapidly greenlit $6.6bn, 400-acre data centre development in the satellite city of Independence, just east of Kansas City.
A worker for a local ministry, Garrett’s unease extends beyond the project’s demand on local water and electricity supplies to the broader social impact of the industry it is being built to support.
“I have grandchildren . . . It does concern me that they’re being drawn into a world that isn’t real,” she said.
Her concerns, which poll after poll has shown are shared by much of Trump’s base, are increasingly at odds with the posture and policies of his administration.
Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry’s agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and greenlighting the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states’ attempts to regulate chatbots.
Trump’s advisers — plucked from Silicon Valley and led by AI tsar David Sacks, an investor with close ties to the industry — have warned Republican state legislatures not to pass AI safety bills and challenged claims AI tools will cause widespread job losses or environmental damage. The president has emphasised that American AI dominance is a “national security imperative”.
But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology. Political strategists fear this could wreck Republicans’ chance of maintaining their majority in Congress this November and become a defining issue in the 2028 presidential race.
Brad Littlejohn, a director at the conservative think-tank American Compass, said: “There’s a real danger here that you get a Democratic candidate who really builds their message around this . . . and wipes the floor because the Republicans have been pigeonholed as the friends of the AI companies.”
Polling by Public First for the FT found about 60 per cent of Trump voters are concerned about AI’s rapid development and almost 80 per cent believe the technology needed more regulation.
A recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, a pressure group that campaigns for more AI regulation, found close to four-fifths of voters in Republican-supporting states wanted tech groups to be liable for harming children.
While the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan urges companies to “build, baby, build”, dozens of data centre developments have been stalled across the US because of local opposition, including in Kentucky, Georgia, Texas and other Republican strongholds.
The backlash is most pronounced when it comes to policing AI. Last year, the White House twice tried to pass federal legislation that would ban state-level AI regulation, only to be thwarted by some of the president’s closest Maga allies including Steve Bannon.
Instead of backing down, Trump, who has attracted tens of millions of dollars in donations from AI billionaires such as OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, in December forced through a similar measure via an executive order, echoing the industry’s claims that AI companies would be “destroyed” if obliged to comply with a “patchwork” of safety laws.
The order threatened to withhold federal funds from states that pass “onerous” laws to govern AI and ordered the Department of Justice to investigate attempts at regulating the nascent technology, but it is being defied.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, seen as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, last month hit out at the “very harmful” effects of AI and criticised Trump-backed attempts to “kneecap the states and let Big Tech write the rules”.
Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, has also publicly broken with the administration over the issue, as has Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox.
While Sacks has painted state-level regulation as an existential threat to the industry that would thwart efforts to beat China, his close friend JD Vance, the vice-president, said in the summer he understood the arguments against a moratorium and could “kind of go both ways” on the issue.
Vance, a protégé of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel who is also close to tech podcasters such as Chamath Palihapitiya, nonetheless told Fox News on Tuesday there were a “lot of things we are worried about” about the rollout of AI, including privacy violations.
A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
The AI industry has amassed a war chest to back candidates who support light-touch regulation. One group backed by venture capital titan Andreessen Horowitz raised more than $125mn last year.
But in state capitols across the US, the mood music is very different. At least 370 AI-related measures have been introduced in state legislatures this year, according to FT analysis, with more than 120 of those originating in Republican-led chambers.
The intensity of the opposition to AI in Missouri is remarkable. After Meta and others built large data centres in the state over the past two years, lured by the the many rivers and tax abatements, the city of St Charles fought back. Last August, the district just outside St Louis became the first in the US to implement a year-long ban on new data centre construction.
Colin Wellenkamp, a Republican who represents St Charles in the Missouri state legislature, said: “The top three items people are most thinking about are: what are you doing with my water and my air, what are you doing to keep AI secure where you’re not using it to pull scams . . . or replicate identities and is it going to take my job?”
St Charles’ residents are proposing a permanent data centre ban. In the past week, residents in other parts of the state held three different meetings to protest such construction.
The Republican-dominated state legislature is proposing at least 10 bills regulating AI in defiance of Trump.
One law was introduced by Republican state senator Joe Nicola, whose district includes Independence. He is concerned AI tools are being deployed to surveil his blue-collar constituents including Amazon workers during shifts at a local warehouse.
“I don’t care who the president is,” Nicola said. “Being told as an elected official in this state [that] I can’t protect my people. No, that goes against my principles.”
AI is “just advancing so rapidly”, said Nicola, a pastor-turned-politician whose bill bans the technology from being treated as sentient. “We have data centres going up all over the place and we still have no regulation . . . we literally have reports across the nation where people have married an AI,” he added. “We’re headed in a really bad direction very, very quickly if we don’t have some regulation on this.”
Other state lawmakers are proposing legislation that would make AI developers responsible for potential harms caused by the technology, particularly chatbots. This is a real threat in Missouri, where juries are known to award large damages to plaintiffs taking on large corporations.
Some Maga groups in the state have supported them.
“We support Trump’s efforts to win the AI race, but we don’t want to do it at the expense of human dignity,” said Byron Keelin, head of Freedom Principle, a right-wing group that this summer rallied its members to oppose the president’s attempt to ban state legislation. “We are trying to protect citizens from being taken advantage of by big corporations.”
In Washington, Josh Hawley, Missouri’s senior senator and one of Trump’s strongest supporters, has warned the AI revolution is “working against the working man, his liberty and his worth”. He has introduced federal legislation that would force AI companies to verify users’ ages and ban them from providing virtual “companions” to minors.
The Trump administration has attempted to temper the AI backlash. The president has called on data centre operators to “pick up the tab” for their power consumption and the White House has been keen to stress that facilities will not receive federal subsidies.
Companies including Microsoft and Anthropic have also sought to calm tensions by pledging to absorb some costs and spend more to support local communities whose lives are upended by AI.
Yet there is no sign the White House is rethinking its resolute backing for the industry. With AI investments underpinning much of the US’s recent economic growth, “we can’t afford to go backwards”, Sacks wrote.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Residents of Independence, meanwhile, feel whiplashed by the pace of change.
Garrett said: “I’ve listened to [Elon Musk] talk about . . . how quickly it is happening and I don’t know, I just think sometimes things need to be slowed down a little bit, put some thought into it.”
“Why does it need to happen so quickly? I know that there’s a race, but I don’t have a good answer for that.”
