What did Donald Trump do today?

He went to bat for data centers, which infuriate most Americans but please the people most likely to give him money.

Trump gave an interview with his former fixer Michael Cohen that aired today, in which he made the politically dubious choice to go to bat for data centers. In those remarks, Trump claimed that data centers were "making their own power plants. They're building the most beautiful, you've never seen power plants like this."

It's true that some data centers aren't relying on existing grid electricity, especially where state regulators have been active in protecting American households from the price spikes that would cause. But the "power plants" that supply electricity to data centers instead are usually massive gas turbines: loud, inefficient, and polluting in ways that directly harm human health. Not only that, but Trump has declared off-the-grid polluting power sources to be exempt from the few environmental regulations his administration still enforces.

It's not at all clear what Trump, whose go-to solution for cybersecurity issues was to hire bike messengers, thinks data centers do. For that matter, he's never shown any real understanding of AI and what it can or can't do. But he does seem to understand that the people who bankroll him politically, or who simply put money in his pocket, are in favor of building data centers, and want him to make it harder for Americans to control where they're built. Trump has already paid off his end of the bargain, issuing executive orders that exempt data centers from normal regulations and open up publicly-owned land as building sites.

For everyone else, data centers are about as unpopular as Trump himself is, with seven in ten Americans saying they don't want them built where they live.

Why does this matter?

• Generally speaking, when the American public is this strongly opposed to something there are good reasons for it. 

• Presidents who want to change public opinion on something should probably know the first thing about what they're talking about.