CHECK WASN’T IN THE MAIL

Trump’s Claim About Residents Getting $10K Checks Proven False

Residents say they don’t know anything about the payment.

President Donald Trump claimed last week that people living near a Louisiana data center were paid $10,000. But a local TV station has found that no such payment exists.

Trump brought up the supposed checks in a Monday interview with Fox2 Detroit’s Roop Raj, responding to a question about a proposed data center moratorium in Michigan.

“We had a community in Louisiana, and they were really opposed,” he said. “All of a sudden, they got paid $10,000. Everyone living in the community got a check for $10,000, and everybody loved it.”

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“They said, ‘When do we do our next data center?’” he added.

But WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that both Louisiana’s economic development agency and residents living near the state’s largest data center project were unaware of any checks.

“If there were $10,000 payments, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops,” Louisiana Economic Development spokesperson Emma Wagner told the station.

Wagner suggested the president might have been thinking of $50,000 bonuses given to teachers in the Richland Parish school district, where a 4-million-square-foot Meta data center called Hyperion is being built.

The bonuses resulted from a surge in sales tax revenue driven by construction.

When completed, the project will be one of the world’s largest data centers.

Two Richland Parish residents told WWL-TV that they had not received any direct payments from Meta or anyone else.

Trump told Raj that communities living near data centers are “becoming very rich” and “their taxes are going down.”

Earlier this week, the president also floated incentives for residents near data centers in a Truth Social post, writing that unpopular projects “have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.”

“MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!” he wrote.

But polling shows backlash against data centers is building ahead of November’s midterm elections.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of people surveyed would oppose a data center project in their own community.

Just 14 percent of respondents said they were okay with a center being built near them.

A recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also found that about half of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about AI’s environmental impacts.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Evgenia AnastasakosBreaking News Intern

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