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Diaper Don declares the danger a HOAX - and his own faithful tell him to stick the data centre in his back garden

• Trump told Truth Social that A.I. and data centres will be the greatest economic engine in history, bigger than oil, gold, diamonds or the internet
• In his own replies, on his own platform, criticism outnumbered support by nearly FOUR TO ONE
• By Monday afternoon the danger was a "HOAX", filed alongside the impeachments and the Russia inquiry
• New York Times/Siena poll: Republicans split 49-47, three quarters of Democrats and 60 per cent of independents opposed

He built the room. He decorated the room. He hand-picked everyone in the room.

And the room told him to get stuffed.

WHAT HE ACTUALLY POSTED

Artificial intelligence and the data centres that run it, Diaper Don announced this week, "will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History - Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet."

Capital letters his. They usually are.

Then came Monday, and Monday was a trilogy.

First: guardrails are not needed, because the United States is led by a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."

That is the safety plan. That is the whole safety plan. The most powerful technology anyone has ever built is to be supervised by a man who has just told you, in block capitals, how clever he is.

Second: A.I. is "the Golden Goose" and we must not kill it.

Third, by early afternoon: the fear that it might be "taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad" is - and I want you to sit down for this - "a HOAX."

Same word as the impeachments. Same word as the Russia investigation. The man has one file folder and he puts everything in it.

THE REVOLT IN THE REPLIES

Here is the part that made my morning.

Truth Social is his. He created it in 2022. About six million people use it, and they are not there by accident - they are the ones who like him most, the ones who turn up under every post to applaud.

The New York Times went through thousands of replies to those A.I. posts. Comments knocking A.I. and data centres beat comments backing them by close to four to one.

Not Democrats. Not the media. Them. His own.

One said they had voted for him three times and did not care to have this shoved down their throat. One asked what happens to all this machinery the day he is no longer president - a question I would love to hear answered slowly. Several suggested, helpfully, that the first data centre be built at Mar-a-Lago, so the man himself can enjoy the noise.

And to sort the thousands of comments, The Times used an A.I. tool.

Of course it did. Beautiful. The robot counted the people who hate robots.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE NOISE

This is not a few cranks in a comment section.

A New York Times/Siena poll published Tuesday found a majority of likely voters oppose building data centres. Republicans were the friendliest audience the Tangerine Tyrant has and even they only managed 49 per cent in favour to 47 per cent against.

Three quarters of Democrats opposed. Sixty per cent of independents opposed.

Pew Research found worry about A.I. climbing to half of all Republicans in 2025, up from 45 per cent in 2021.

Raymond La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, put it plainly: "It really doesn't play well to his base because a lot of those folks are probably worried about A.I. taking their jobs."

He also offered the forecast I would bet the house on. "If things start to unravel with A.I. and we start seeing major social disruptions, you're going to see him do a quick reversal."

Naturally. The Golden Goose will become a Deep State Goose by teatime, and it will turn out he was against it from the beginning, and he said so, and everybody knows he said so.

MEANWHILE, IN THE REAL WORLD

The data centres are not an argument on a phone screen. They are enormous, and they are going up in rural country, much of it Republican country, much of it the South.

Politicians can read a room even when the President cannot. In the Pennsylvania governor's race the incumbent, Josh Shapiro, has signed an executive order demanding stricter guardrails on the things, and his Republican challenger, Stacy Garrity, has promised to pause them altogether. They are now competing over who hates data centres more.

And last week a researcher at the A.I. company Anthropic resigned over fears that the technology is moving too fast to be safe.

The President's response to a safety researcher walking out of the building was to tell you it is all a hoax.

WE HAVE BEEN HERE

We saw this pattern when he started a war with Iran this year and then went online to boast about it, and the replies filled up with supporters mourning the "peace president" they thought they had bought.

Same room. Same shock. Same man, discovering that the people who cheer him are allowed to have a second thought.

I am not going to pretend I know how this ends, and I am not going to dress up my guesses as reporting.

But I know this much. When the diamonds-and-oil-and-gold speech is met with "build it at Mar-a-Lago" from your own side, you have not led your people anywhere.

You have simply walked off and assumed they were following.