Few groups enjoyed the early months of Donald Trump’s return to the White House as much as the tech and finance executives who helped put him to become the president. Elon Musk was given free rein inside both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and, for a short time, the federal government itself. The chief executives of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon were given prime seats at the inauguration. And the rules governing their companies were rewritten fast to favour them, as the new administration took a hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and monopolies in general.
However, that honeymoon is over. As reported by Bloomberg, Trump promised voters lower prices and an easier life. He has not delivered either. Along with the deep unpopularity of his policies, especially his global trade war and the real war with Iran, this failure has triggered a backlash. Now Trump’s wealthy backers, especially Musk and other AI industry CEOs, are facing sharp attacks from Democratic congressional candidates, and even a few Republicans, all of whom are promising a crackdown on big business if they win.
A progressive upset in Michigan
Earlier this week, Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan in 2018, won a tight race in the Democratic US Senate primary. He beat Representative Haley Stevens by about one percentage point, despite being outspent nearly ten to one by outside groups, including one tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. His platform centered on cracking down on monopolies, taxing billionaires and regulating AI, and he campaigned for a moratorium on new data centers until communities have legal protections in place.
El-Sayed framed the race as a fight over who controls the economy. He told voters the election was a choice between a politics of the people or one run by corporations and billionaires. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both campaigned for him, and Sanders argued the race was really about whether billionaire-funded super PACs would be allowed to keep dominating American elections.
The right has its own populist wing
The backlash against big business is not confined to the left. In the Florida Republican primary for governor, a young, extreme-right candidate named James Fishback has won over a large number of young men with racial provocations and a call to ban data centers outright. His rise shows that frustration with concentrated corporate power, and with the tech billionaires seen as Trump’s closest allies, is not a purely Democratic phenomenon. It is bleeding into corners of the Republican base as well.
As much as the blowback is about support for a deeply unpopular president, much of it comes down to plain economic inequality. Workers have watched the net worth of Trump allies like Musk and Jeff Bezos climb sharply higher. In a stronger economy, some voters might have looked at that wealth aspirationally, as proof the system could work for them too. But with the job market wobbling and inflation still stubbornly high, it is hard for many people to feel anything but resentment. And increasingly, they are voting on that resentment.
That dynamic helps explain why AI and data centers in particular have become flashpoints. The industry has attracted enormous investment and enormous power in Washington, even as ordinary voters worry about job losses, rising electricity bills tied to data-center power demand, and a political system that seems to answer to a handful of very rich men. Candidates on both ends of the spectrum have figured out that attacking that arrangement is a winning message right now, and Trump’s closest business allies are the most visible targets.