Behold the latest chapter in the chronicles of human obsolescence. It seems the powers that be—or the powers that desperately want to be—have finally noticed that the digital gods we’ve been worshipping in the form of Large Language Models have a rather gluttonous appetite for the one thing we can’t stop wasting: energy. Donald Trump and a motley crew of state regulators are now posturing as the defenders of the humble ratepayer, vowing to shield the common man from the crushing weight of electricity bills inflated by the insatiable hunger of Artificial Intelligence. It is a performance of such breathtaking hypocrisy that it almost commands respect, provided you have the intellectual capacity of a sea cucumber.

For years, these same state governments have been bending over backward, offering tax breaks and administrative hand-jobs to Big Tech, inviting them to build massive, windowless data centers in the middle of nowhere. They called it 'innovation.' They called it 'job creation.' In reality, it was simply an invitation for a digital parasite to latch onto an aging, decrepit power grid that was already held together by duct tape and the fading memories of 1950s infrastructure projects. Now that the bill has arrived, and the average citizen is realizing their monthly utility cost looks like the GDP of a small island nation, the politicians are shocked—shocked!—to find that powering a machine to generate pictures of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket requires an actual physical resource.

Enter Donald Trump, the master of the populist pivot. He has smelled the ozone of voter resentment and decided that A.I. is the new boogeyman, or at least its energy consumption is. It’s a classic play: find a genuine grievance—high utility bills—and wrap it in a cloak of nationalistic protectionism. The rhetoric is predictable. He’ll claim to protect the 'forgotten man' from the 'radical tech elites,' ignoring the fact that his own administration’s deregulation fetish helped pave the way for this resource-hugging free-for-all. It’s a cynical attempt to harvest votes from the very people whose economic futures were sold off to the highest bidder long ago.

On the other side of the aisle, the states are playing their own game of bureaucratic theater. Regulators are suddenly 'concerned' about how A.I. data centers are straining the grid. These are the same regulators who have presided over a decade of stagnant infrastructure investment and a 'green energy transition' that has been more about performative virtue signaling than actual engineering. They want to stop A.I. from inflating bills, not because they care about your bank account, but because they are terrified of the political fallout when the lights start flickering. They are trying to put a lid on a boiling pot they’ve been stoking for years, hoping we won’t notice their hands are still on the dial.

The absurdity of the situation is truly majestic. We are told that A.I. is the future, a tool of such preternatural intelligence that it will solve all of humanity’s problems. Yet, its first major contribution to society appears to be making it impossible for a retiree in Ohio to afford to run their air conditioner in July. We are sacrificing the tangible—warmth, light, and financial stability—on the altar of the intangible. We are burning real coal and splitting real atoms so that a silicon brain can hallucinate a three-paragraph LinkedIn post about 'synergy.'

The tech companies, of course, are playing the victim, claiming that any regulation of their energy use will stifle 'American competitiveness.' It’s the ultimate trump card. If we don’t let them suck the grid dry, the Chinese will do it first! It’s a race to the bottom of a very dark, very expensive well. They want the public to subsidize their 'revolution' while they hoard the profits in offshore accounts, laughing all the way to the server farm.

In the end, this isn't about energy or A.I. or even the 'forgotten man.' It’s about the fundamental inability of our political class to plan more than ten minutes into the future. Whether it’s Trump’s opportunistic barking or the states’ frantic paper-shuffing, the result will be the same: the consumer will pay. They will pay in higher rates, they will pay in a more fragile grid, and they will pay by being forced to watch this agonizingly stupid debate play out on screens powered by the very electricity they can no longer afford. The lights are going out, but at least we’ll have a chatbot to tell us why we should be grateful for the darkness.