This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

As Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas for their pre-midterm convention last week, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico focused on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. 

Talarico got a tour of the Reading Room, a traveling exhibit of the nearly 3 million files that the Department of Justice released from its investigation into the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — the result of a hard-fought battle by survivors of Epstein’s abuse who are still seeking justice and transparency from a government they say repeatedly failed them. 

The Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new Talking Points Memo investigation can reveal.

Democrats are taking a convoluted, complex provision that was included in Republicans’ Big Beautiful bill to pin the blame for the national boom in data center construction squarely on Republicans ahead of the midterms.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is most widely known for making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and offsetting the cost of those tax cuts by gutting social safety net programs for America’s most vulnerable. But the legislation did a lot of other seemingly anodyne things. For one, the bill expanded and made permanent an IRS tax incentive program that began in 2018 to encourage and support economic growth and job creation in rural areas.

During President Trump’s first term, the IRS designated certain “economically distressed census tracts” as Qualified Opportunity Zones in order to spur economic growth in those areas. Under the program, investors can receive tax breaks for job creation in rural parts of the country, according to this IRS fact sheet (might come as a shock but I do not have any prior knowledge about QOZs, as the IRS refers to them, and had to do some research to write about this particular part of the tax code 🫠).

Anyways, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) was a champion of making these tax credits permanent and expanding incentives for rural development, and oversaw getting provisions about the IRS program worked into the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law last summer. Republicans at one point championed the expanded tax benefits included in the bill as an opportunity for more data center construction in rural areas, according to Politico.

But that was a different time when opposition to data centers wasn’t known to be the one issue uniting Americans across the political spectrum, which my colleague Josh Marshall and I have written about a bunch in the past few weeks. Republicans are now struggling to message on the issue as the head of their party, President Trump, makes it impossible for them to hold any nuanced position on the matter — and therefore speak to voters’ outrage about the data center explosion.

Democrats are leaning in to this.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) launched a new rhetorical flex over Republicans on the increasingly bipartisan issue during his news conference on Monday.

“Every single House Republican but one or two voted to unleash data centers on the American people in an unfettered fashion,” he said.

The details of what Republicans actually did to expand the tax incentives are incredibly in the weeds, but the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown from summer 2025 here, and so does the Brookings Institute.

But Democrats’ messaging about the expanded program and Republicans’ interest in expanding it for the purpose of big tech development is catching on, per Politico:

The next day, a senior House Democrat — Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts — made a similar observation on the chamber floor.

“A year ago, Republicans were bragging about giving tax breaks to Big Tech in order to build data centers,” McGovern said. “With November on the horizon, some House Republicans are acting as if they did not turbocharge the data center build-out.”

Comer Claims McConnell Will Be Back for Next Session

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) told CNN that the senior senator from his state will be back to his duties in the Senate at the start of its next session on September 14. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not performed his work duties in months and was hospitalized in mid-June. It took weeks for his office to share information about the hospitalization.

After conspiracy theories swirled online about McConnell being secretly … not alive anymore, the Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear began calling on the senator to give Americans some sort of proof of life and update on his health. Reports surfaced that he may have suffered some sort of cardiac episode at his home in June. In July, McConnell announced that he had been hospitalized after a fall and was in a rehabilitation center. He was discharged in early August.

“I have not talked to Leader McConnell. I’ve talked to his staff, many of whom are from my district originally. And they have all said it’s their goal for Senator McConnell to be here when the Senate comes in,” Comer told CNN Thursday.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Convention Part 2

ABC News has more reporting today on Republicans who are up for reelection this fall — and even some in solidly red districts — skipping out on the Republican Party’s unconventional midterms convention in Dallas later this month. That’s primarily because they want distance from Trump, who is set to headline the event with an anticipated speech spinning his deeply unpopular record so far this term.

Yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand had the details on Politico‘s survey of nearly 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. The majority of them said they’re skipping the affair.

ABC spoke to a handful of the most vulnerable House Republicans, and they all said they didn’t plan to attend or were still undecided. About 100 Republican members of Congress and candidates are expected to make the trek — and shell out the $25,000 to $100,000 that each attendee has been asked to contribute to the House Republican campaign committee in order to attend.

Vance’s Subtle Dig

Vice President JD Vance hosted the White House press briefing Thursday, since no one has been hired to replace Karoline Leavitt since she decided to leave the Trump administration. Reporters asked him about his ongoing friendship with Tucker Carlson, despite the former Fox News host’s stark criticism of major elements of Trump’s second-term agenda. He responded saying he was bothered by people who stopped being friends with his wife when he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, but his response also appears to contain a subtle dig at Trump, who throws literally anyone and everyone under the bus for any perceived double crossing.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” Vance said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

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Trump Is Making It Impossible

President Trump has made it impossible for Republicans to seize on a relatively easy, bipartisan issue that could help them win over voters in the midterms if they spoke about it in the right way. As he espouses bombastic rhetoric about how only “poor and backwards” people oppose data center construction, Republicans have struggled with how exactly to cross him on the matter.

American opposition to data center construction in their communities is one of the only issues that voters across the political spectrum can agree on at the moment. TPM has been tracking the bipartisan outrage aimed at the tech industry’s attempts to expand this construction boom in rural and urban communities around the nation. A May Gallup poll found that more than 70% of Americans are anti-data center, primarily because of their fears about tech companies coming in to their towns and building facilities that drain local water and energy resources, all for the purpose of expanding the capabilities of artificial intelligence that could eventually be used to strip human Americans of their jobs.

The backlash is simple, relatable and widespread enough that some Republicans — including anti-regulation Republicans who have embraced accelerated AI development — are attempting to message around data center differently heading into the midterms given how universal fears are among voters. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, has, at least temporarily, blocked new data center projects from connecting to the state’s power grid. After extending an open invitation to tech companies to come and build in Texas, Abbott softened his stance amid mounting voter backlash about rising energy costs tied to the projects.

Trump has made any attempt at nuance nearly impossible for members of his party facing reelection. He’s paid back the tech company executives who donated to his inauguration and funded his White House ballroom by using his second term to push for unregulated AI expansion and is even pushing new rules that make it more difficult for local governments to get public input on data center construction.

Earlier this week, the president planted himself firmly in alignment with Big Tech interests by suggesting only communities that want to be “poor and backwards” should be opposed to the construction of the facilities and the natural gas plants that run them.

Likely recognizing the vulnerable opening Trump created with his hard line on the matter, Vice President JD Vance tried to dial that back a bit, suggesting that tech companies should “be putting power back into the grid” in the communities where they’re building. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to do something similar on Monday.

“These entities need to be self-sufficient,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station. “They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level.”

The Trump administration has, reportedly, tried to press data center developers to sign a pledge that they will try to keep electricity costs in check in the communities where they’re doing construction. But you wouldn’t know it from Trump’s rhetoric. It appears that both Thune and Vance are trying to give vulnerable Republicans a reasonable message to voters on an issue that could be an easy win — if Trump cared about Republicans winning the midterms more than maintaining the Big Tech oligarchy he’s enabled.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Dallas Convention

The Republican Party is hosting a bizarre midterms convention in Dallas later this month in an event that will feature President Trump as the headlining speaker. He’s reportedly planning to use the moment to tout his perception of his record so far this term, in hopes that it will somehow bolster Republicans’ prospects in November (unclear how his cratering approval rating factors into all of this).

But the GOP convention in Dallas is not exactly something that Republicans are rushing to attend — and why would they? Trump has actively made it harder for Republicans to have anything concrete to campaign on this cycle, both in the data center realm, as I unpacked above, and also on other issues, like his obsession with the SAVE Act (and torpedoing easy wins while pressuring Congress to pass it).

Politico surveyed more than 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress to see if any were planning to attend. Most are not:

The 45 Republicans cited a variety of reasons for skipping the first midterm convention put on by a major party in more than four decades. Some cited prior obligations such as fundraisers or events in their districts that were planned before the convention was scheduled in June. Others had personal conflicts, like weddings and family events, and still others raised qualms about the five-figure-minimum fees that party officials want attending lawmakers to pony up.

And some Republicans in tough races are steering clear of the gathering — which has come to be called “Trump-a-palooza” in some GOP circles — as they face growing hesitation about associating themselves with the polarizing president so close to the election.

But Maybe They’ll Come to This

MS NOW reports:

President Donald Trump is hosting vulnerable Republican incumbents facing tough re-election contests for dinner in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, according to a White House official with knowledge of the invitations.

The invitees include GOP lawmakers who are locked in competitive races this November, according to the official, who declined to provide a full list of the Republican attendees.

Here’s What Else You Should Read From TPM Today

Josh Kovensky has new details on the Trump administration’s use of a tool that Congress created in 2001, in the early days of the War on Terror, to investigate groups that oppose the Trump administration’s agenda: DHS Brings PATRIOT Act Tool to Bear in NSPM-7 Investigation

Emine Yücel has a new piece out today that outlines how Democrats have evolved on the issue of expanding the Supreme Court: What Democrats Have, and Haven’t, Said About Supreme Court Reform

“The destruction of a professional military has to rank among the most egregious and long-lasting of Trump II initiatives targeting government itself, along with his attacks on the merit-based civil service system, his abusive misuse of the Justice Department, his elimination of USAID, and his running roughshod over Congress’ power of the purse,” David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo: The Pentagon Purges Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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