Republicans reportedly fear datacenter backlash could cost them Ohio Senate seat
Amid signs that the Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s support for the AI datacenters Donald Trump touts at every opportunity could cost him his seat, and imperil the Republican majority in the Senate, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has reportedly warned leading AI companies that they need to arrest the public backlash to the massive warehouses springing up across the state.
Husted trailed his Democratic challenger, former senator Sherrod Brown, by eight percentage points in a recent poll for Fox News, and the Republican campaign arm suggested in a memo obtained by Axios and then the Washington Post that Brown is successfully channeling grassroots outrage over the noisy, energy-sucking centers.
“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the NRSC wrote. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice – and they will not go near the next one.”
“This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle,” the campaign committee added.
A recent ad from Brown’s campaign blames Husted for encouraging the rapid expansion of datacenters in Ohio.
Charlie Blaettler, political director of the Guardrails Alliance, a Democratic Super PAC formed to combat “AI billionaire Trump donors trying to buy our elections and prevent common sense regulation”, said in a statement that the memo proves that the Republican party “is panicking because they sold out to the AI industry – a while ago – and they know it”.
Republicans, Blaettler said, “are realizing how wildly unpopular Big AI’s agenda is with the American people. Now the GOP and AI’s unaccountable billionaires are scrambling to backtrack and find a new way to pull the wool over the eyes of the public so they can get what they want: A Congress that will do their bidding and an AI future that benefits them, not the many.”
“It is time for the Democratic party to make it clear who they stand with”, he added. “A handful of Big Tech billionaires or the majority of people in the country who want commonsense regulation for this unprecedented technology.”
When he was asked by a Maga influencer about the public unease with AI datacenters on Wednesday, Trump argued they generate tax revenue and construction jobs, “and many of them are designed in a very beautiful way”.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Donald Trump nominated Dr Heidi Overton – an abortion opponent who stood next to the president as he made false claims about vaccines – to be commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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Democrats quickly denounced the nomination and promised to oppose it. Patty Murray, who sits on the Senate health committee, called Overton “a far-right, anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading the FDA”.
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Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate health committee, said that he has “strong concerns” about Overton’s “active role in last week’s nonsensical vaccine executive order” casting doubt on the safety of the MMR vaccine. “That alone is almost disqualifying.”
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The US debt reached $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, the US treasury department said, after the government deficit doubled over the last decade.
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Trump told reporters, as he gave them a tour of his new helipad, that he will meet the North Korean communist leader, Kim Jong-un, later this year. Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s leader, said she knew “absolutely nothing” about talks with Trump, and that the US remains an enemy of Pyongyang.
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Trump said he has delayed implementing tariffs on some Canadian goods because he thought a deal had been reached.
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Amid signs that the Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s support for the AI datacenters Trump touts at every opportunity could cost him his seat, and imperil the Republican majority in the Senate, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) reportedly warned leading AI companies that they need to arrest the public backlash.
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Trump posted on Wednesday that he intends to inflict “the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!”
Republican chair of Senate health committee calls Trump’s FDA nominee’s role in his ‘nonsensical’ vaccine order ‘almost disqualifying’
Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate health committee, said that he has “strong concerns” about Donald Trump’s nomination of Dr Heidi Overton to be commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Writing on social media, Cassidy, a medical doctor who was outraged by Trump’s executive order last week calling the MMR vaccine “lethal”, said that he respects Dr Overton’s “experience as a physician,” he is concerned her “lack of managerial experience does not prepare her well for leading a large organization that is already dealing with staffing and morale issues.”
“Additionally, Dr. Overton’s active role in last week’s nonsensical vaccine executive order calls into question her commitment to standing up for sound science and protecting children’s health. That alone is almost disqualifying”, Cassidy wrote.
Trump declares economic warfare on Iran ‘on an unprecedented scale’
Clearly frustrated that his attempts to force Iran into submission through airstrikes have failed, Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he intends to inflict “the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!”
“This will be Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale”, the president posted on his social media platform, with the possible assistance of his close aide Natalie Harp.
“ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences”, the president’s statement added. “Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies — It all needs to stop NOW. You know who you are. This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat.”
“These maniacs are on the ropes”, the president insisted, before again repeating that the aim of his campaign was to force Iran to renounce nuclear weapons, which it did 11 years ago in the nuclear deal struck during the Obama administration that Trump scuttled during his first term.
Republicans reportedly fear datacenter backlash could cost them Ohio Senate seat
Amid signs that the Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s support for the AI datacenters Donald Trump touts at every opportunity could cost him his seat, and imperil the Republican majority in the Senate, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has reportedly warned leading AI companies that they need to arrest the public backlash to the massive warehouses springing up across the state.
Husted trailed his Democratic challenger, former senator Sherrod Brown, by eight percentage points in a recent poll for Fox News, and the Republican campaign arm suggested in a memo obtained by Axios and then the Washington Post that Brown is successfully channeling grassroots outrage over the noisy, energy-sucking centers.
“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the NRSC wrote. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice – and they will not go near the next one.”
“This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle,” the campaign committee added.
A recent ad from Brown’s campaign blames Husted for encouraging the rapid expansion of datacenters in Ohio.
Charlie Blaettler, political director of the Guardrails Alliance, a Democratic Super PAC formed to combat “AI billionaire Trump donors trying to buy our elections and prevent common sense regulation”, said in a statement that the memo proves that the Republican party “is panicking because they sold out to the AI industry – a while ago – and they know it”.
Republicans, Blaettler said, “are realizing how wildly unpopular Big AI’s agenda is with the American people. Now the GOP and AI’s unaccountable billionaires are scrambling to backtrack and find a new way to pull the wool over the eyes of the public so they can get what they want: A Congress that will do their bidding and an AI future that benefits them, not the many.”
“It is time for the Democratic party to make it clear who they stand with”, he added. “A handful of Big Tech billionaires or the majority of people in the country who want commonsense regulation for this unprecedented technology.”
When he was asked by a Maga influencer about the public unease with AI datacenters on Wednesday, Trump argued they generate tax revenue and construction jobs, “and many of them are designed in a very beautiful way”.
US gross national debt tops $40tn for first time
Lauren Aratani
The US debt reached $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, the US treasury department said, after the government deficit doubled over the last decade.
The treasury’s latest debt balance showed $40.047tn on Tuesday afternoon, the highest in US history.
The milestone marks years of government spending that grew under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. During his first term, Trump approved $8.4tn worth of debt, with a huge chunk going to Covid-19 relief spending, while Biden approved $4.3tn worth of debt, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
In fiscal year 2026, which started in October 2026, $1.8tn has been added to the debt so far, with a big chunk of new government spending dedicated to tariff refunds, which have totaled $100bn so far, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Government spending watchdog groups have anticipated for weeks the US surpassing the $40tn threshold after debt reached $39tn in March.
“For perspective, it took nearly 200 years for America’s gross debt to reach $1 trillion for the first time in 1981,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in a statement. “$40 trillion of debt doesn’t exist solely on the government’s ledgers; it is felt throughout the economy and finds its way to the pocketbooks of people one way or another. The more we borrow, the more we exacerbate inflation, squeeze out other priorities in the budget, and leave ourselves vulnerable to emergencies at home and turmoil abroad.”
The threshold was breached as Congress, currently out of session, remains at an impasse over its latest spending bill. The US House and Senate passed two different bills that would fund the federal government, which is scheduled to shut down on 30 September if a bill isn’t adopted by both chambers and signed by the president.
Trump’s pick to lead FDA condemned by abortion rights activists as ‘an anti-abortion extremist’
The president of Reproductive Freedom for All, the advocacy group for abortion rights formerly known as Naral, strongly condemned Donald Trump’s pick to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr Heidi Overton.
The group’s president, Mini Timmaraju, strongly condemned Overton in this blistering statement:
Donald Trump is trying to put an anti-abortion extremist in charge of any agency that could seriously undermine reproductive healthcare – including the agency that could roll back access to mifepristone nationwide. Heidi Overton celebrated the fall of Roe, spread junk science about medication abortion, and openly called for remaking the FDA to serve a political agenda instead of the health of the country. Her nomination is another alarming step in Trump’s plan to weaponize every part of the federal government to restrict abortion nationwide.
Anna Betts
The US Department of Justice has defended its prosecution of former FBI director James Comey, claiming in new court documents there is “no serious dispute” that his social media post last year featuring a photo of seashells arranged to read “8647” could be interpreted as a threat against Donald Trump.
“There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey’s post could read it to mean ‘Kill President Trump’,” prosecutors wrote in a document filed on Tuesday in response to efforts by Comey’s efforts to have the case dismissed.
Comey was indicted in April after a grand jury in North Carolina charged him with making a threat against the US president and transmitting that threat, via social media, across state lines, over an image he posted on Instagram while vacationing in North Carolina last May.
In the photo, the seashells were arranged to read “8647”, which the president’s allies and supporters quickly denounced as a threat against Trump. The number “86” is often used as shorthand to mean to get rid of or remove something, while Trump is the 47th US president.
Comey deleted the photo after the uproar, saying he didn’t know that it could be interpreted as a violent threat. “It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
In the court documents filed earlier this week, prosecutors with the eastern district of North Carolina continued to argue the post was a “coded message to his followers meaning ‘kill’ or ‘get rid of’ President Trump”.
Comey has denied the charges against him and his lawyers have asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that the post was protected speech and did not amount to a “true threat” against the president.
Trump says he if he was a mayor, or a governor he would ‘absolutely’ want ‘very beautiful’ datacenters in his city or state
As Democrats increasingly try to channel grassroots opposition to AI datacenters on the midterm campaign trail, Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he is all for them.
Flanked by leaders of the largest US cryptocurrency companies, Trump was asked by a Maga influencer planted in the press pool, Link Lauren, what he would say to supporters who say “we love president Trump, but we’re still cautious about AI and crypto”.
“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a datacenter, I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous,” Trump replied. “So I would say, maybe it can use a little public relations help, but if I were a governor or a mayor, I would want that plant in my community and many of them are designed in a very beautiful way.”
Trump did not say what city or state he would like to lead, but his remarks are also a reminder that he is not barred, after his second term as president, from running for office as a mayor or governor.
The day so far
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Donald Trump nominated Dr Heidi Overton – an abortion opponent who stood next to the president as he made false claims about vaccines – to be commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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Democrats quickly denounced the nomination and promised to oppose it. Patty Murray, who sits on the Senate health committee, called Overton “a far-right, anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading the FDA”.
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Trump told reporters, as he gave them a tour of his new helipad, that he will meet the North Korean communist leader, Kim Jong-un, later this year. Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s leader, said she knew “absolutely nothing” about talks with Trump, and that the US remains an enemy of Pyongyang.
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Trump said he has delayed implementing tariffs on some Canadian goods because he thought a deal had been reached with that country’s prime minister, Mark Carney.
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Trump met with top executives from cryptocurrency companies, an industry that helped him increase his net worth by at least $1.4bn last year, according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June.
Kim Jong-un’s sister casts doubt on Trump’s claims of secret US-North Korea talks
Andrew Roth
On this subject, the reclusive North Korean leader’s younger sister has cast doubt on communications with Donald Trump and dampened hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough between them.
Yesterday, Trump suggested he and Kim Jong-un were holding secret negotiations after announcing the US would downgrade its participation in military exercises held by South Korea. Asked whether Kim had responded to his request for a conversation, Trump said: “Yeah, he has.”
As I said earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Trump was pushing aides to set up an in-person meeting with Kim, potentially during a trip to Asia in November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China.
But today, Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s supreme leader, said she knew “absolutely nothing” about the supposed communications, and that while Trump and Kim had an excellent relationship, the US remained an enemy of Pyongyang.
“The United States’ hostile policy toward the DPRK has not changed, and the United States and its followers are vigorously carrying out hostile military activities against the DPRK even at this very moment,” she said in a statement carried by North Korean state media.
She lauded the relationship between her brother and Trump, saying he had “personally good memories and feelings” toward the US president.
But she cast doubt on whether her brother had secretly been in communication with Trump. “Perhaps it is the only matter I do not know about in relation to our supreme leadership’s foreign policy,” she said.
Trump suggests North Korea not a threat while he is president
Donald Trump then once again touted his “good” relationship with Kim Jong-un, before adding in an astonishing admission that he didn’t anticipate the North Korean leader doing anything during the remainder of his time in office.
He told reporters:
Now, I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea … when I’m friendly with him … when I don’t see anything happening for, certainly, two and a half years – it’s not going to happen with me.
Then, Trump got to the crux of why he had ordered the US to scale back what he said were “inappropriate and hostile” joint military drills with South Korea, stating once again that he was “not happy” when Seoul declined to join US efforts against Iran in the strait of Hormuz. “I didn’t like that,” Trump said.
As my colleague Joseph Gedeon noted on Monday, this is not the first time Trump has treated the drills as a bargaining chip. After his 2018 summit with Kim in Singapore, he suspended major exercises outright, calling them costly and provocative, before they were quietly restored once nuclear diplomacy with Pyongyang broke down.
Earlier, Trump said he will meet Kim later this year, in what would be their first of his second term. He also disclosed that North Korea had 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons, in a rare and unusually specific assessment by a US president of Kim’s arsenal.
Trump says he thinks he has a deal with Canada on trade and ‘may bring some of the tariffs down’
Donald Trump has said he delayed tariffs on some Canadian goods because he thought a deal had been reached with prime minister Mark Carney.
“We delayed it for three days because I think we have a deal with the prime minister and [a] good deal for everybody. So that’s good,” Trump told reporters.
Trump said last night he had paused what would have been a bruising 50% US tariff, after reaching an agreement with Canadian administration officials hours before a hike – which would have affected $20bn worth of goods – was set to take effect.
The duties would have affected a range of Canadian exports including wine and hockey sticks.
“Hopefully it’ll be a wonderful deal for everybody,” Trump added.
He was also asked if he was willing to lower tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada to help US farmers. The Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported today that the US is considering lowering that tariff from 50% to 25%.
The president replied: “Well, we’re getting zero for our farmers, who have been hurt very badly by Canada, and they won’t be paying any tariffs any more.”
He added:
We may bring some of the tariffs down to a level where other countries are because Canada was paying a higher tariff.
Trump says he and Xi will talk about AI during Chinese president’s White House visit
Going back a few minutes, there’s been one tidbit from this announcement worth noting.
Trump, saying that the US is “way ahead” of top AI rival China, said he plans on discussing this tech with that country’s president, Xi Jinping.
“President Xi’s coming on September 24th. We look forward to it. We’ll probably be talking about AI and a lot of other things,” Trump said.
Paul Atkins, Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, is now at the lectern, where he’s flattering his boss. “We’re making IPOs great again by cutting red tape,” Atkins said.
Trump says ‘interest rates should be allowed to fall’
Trump took a few minutes at the tech and crypto confab to talk about “the old days” with interest rates. Trump has repeatedly pushed for lower interest rates.
“When we announced good numbers, interest rates would go down,” he said. But these days, that does not happen “because they’re so afraid of inflation”.
“Interest rates should be allowed to fall,” he said.
Trump also called the US “the hottest country” anywhere in the world, apparently referring to the economy.
