FOOL ME THRICE

Three-Time Trump Voter Speaks Out on Trump’s ‘Betrayal’

The faithful Trump voter is not the only Trump fan to be fed up.

A woman who voted three times for Donald Trump has accused him of betraying voters during his second term as president.

Erica Reiner is a farmer from Charles Town, West Virginia. She appeared in an MS NOW special, airing two weeks before the midterms, on AI data centers and the mounting opposition from residents who fear the facilities and the power lines that feed them.

She’s afraid they will drive up costs and swallow their land.

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For her, the threat is Valley Link, a proposed 765-kilovolt power line backed by Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy and Transource, the Virginia Mercury reported. It’s designed to carry electricity east to Northern Virginia to power data centers, where demand for them is soaring. Its towers are expected to stand roughly 160 feet tall, as high as a 12-story building, according to Switchgear Magazine.

In the segment, Reiner blames DOGE for wiping out her government job, and says that now the AI boom the 80-year-old president has championed is coming for her family’s land at Huckleberry Farm.

The job loss came first, MS NOW correspondent Josh Einiger reports. Then came higher fuel prices and tariffs. For Reiner, the towers are just the latest blow.

“When we talk about how angry it makes us when the next hardship comes along, of the towers, the betrayal is pretty significant,” she told Einiger in the network’s special, Sparking Outrage: Data Centers and A.I. Backlash, which aired Sunday.

Reiner isn’t alone. Einiger described a wave of anger across a deep-red pocket of Appalachia. Residents are angry with the developers, their local officials, and Trump himself, he says.

The MS NOW crew flew a drone over Reiner’s property and showed her the footage. She said she had never seen the farm from above.

Asked what struck her about the view, she said, “That it wants to be taken from us. That’s everything we’ve worked for in our adult lives.”

“Come time for presidential elections, yeah, it’s going to [warrant] a conversation of what party we vote for,” she said. “Absolutely, it will.”

“How does it go? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” she added. “Yeah, that kind of deal.”

It turns out Trump hasn’t shown much patience for critics like Erica Reiner.

Einiger noted that polling suggests most Americans oppose data centers. A Fox News poll in September found 71 percent of voters don’t want one in their community. Yet the president has dug in. In late August, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “the only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor.”

Erica isn’t the only Trump voter who feels burned.

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Rena Schroeder, 62, owns a ranch in Lott, Texas, a town of 644 people. Just south of her property, OpenAI is building a Stargate data center, part of the company’s $500 billion AI infrastructure push. She told Einiger her battle against data centers is the toughest she has ever waged.

“This land, it’s our God-given right to own something like this,” she said. “We fought for it, we had to work hard for it, as many Americans have.”

Schroeder once adored the president, Einiger reported, until Trump signed an executive order on July 23, 2025, directing federal agencies to speed up permits for data centers.

Einiger then aired footage of Trump in May, declaring, “We’re going to put these data centers up. I don’t care what you people say. I’m President Trump, I’m in charge.”

Schroeder said she couldn’t stomach it.

“He doesn’t care about us… He did not care. I couldn’t even watch that. I was angry after that,” she said. “Like, I voted for you and you don’t care about me?”

The White House and ValleyLink Developer did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s requests for comment.

Trump’s data center crusade has split even his most loyal followers, and MS NOW framed the segment around the issue’s emergence as a key fault line in the midterms, which are two weeks away on Nov. 3.

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