By every outward appearance, Donald Trump’s very concerned about his inflation polling headed into the mid-terms.

More or less everything he’s done, announced and floated in recent days has some connection to America’s cost of living crisis. He even seems to believe commandeering Venezuela’s oil can make a difference, despite the enormous hurdles (and huge costs) to developing it near-term.

In housing, Trump’s going to run big investors out of the market (to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the private equity lobby) and compel Fannie and Freddie to buy mortgage bonds. In health care, he wants to send money directly to households (a terrible idea, for obvious reasons). He also wants to send Americans “dividend checks” (i.e., more free cash handouts) funded by tariffs whose legal status is uncertain. And at the Fed, he wants to force down policy rates by, among other things, ginning up excuses to fire, sue or even indict, monetary policymakers deemed insufficiently obsequious.

The figure above’s updated with all the latest polling. The red line, as indicated, shows the Real Clear Politics average. In the eyes of voters, Trump simply hasn’t delivered on the campaign promise which, on some accounts, won him the presidency.

He needs to address that at some point, and the vexing part of it is that absent economy-wide deflation (impossible outside of a deep recession, which would create its own set of political problems for the incumbent government during an election year), there really isn’t a way to pacify the public.

It’s not about the growth rate of prices anymore, it’s about prices themselves. They reset higher during 2021/2022’s chaotic macro environment and they’re not going back lower absent a deep recession the “benefits” of which for prices would be outweighed by the liability of lost jobs.

So what do you do if you’re a politician? Well, a lot depends on what kind of politician you are. If you’re a populist — right- or left-wing — you hand out money and resort to state coercion.

Cue Trump’s latest idea: Making big tech companies pay for the construction of new power plants on the excuse it’s their fault electricity prices are rising, or at least it will be their fault when, invariably, chasing the AI dream drives up already high electricity costs for everyday people.

The figure above gives you some context for where things stand today or, technically, where things stood as of October, which is the latest figure I could find quickly.

Long story short, Trump’s partnering up with governors on a scheme to sell wholesale power to tech firms through long-term contracts auctioned by grid operator PJM Interconnection, which provides power to nearly 70 million Americans across a broad swath of the country including northern Virginia, where data centers are an invasive species.

The tech companies would be obligated to pay over the life of the contracts irrespective of their actual power usage, and the revenue would “support the construction of some $15 billion worth of new power plants,” a White House official who spoke to Bloomberg ahead of the official Friday unveil said.

On January 12, Trump previewed this plan on TruthSocial via a characteristically disjointed diatribe which began by blaming Joe Biden for high utility bills before segueing into the data center debate.

“I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump said, adding that the administration’s “working with major American Technology Companies… to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption.” Data centers, Trump went on, are key to winning the AI race, but “the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.'”

The specifics of Trump’s plan (e.g., an urgent auction, construction timeliness and confining bidder participation to data center operators) are a step in the direction of forcing tech companies to expeditiously foot the bill on the way to solving a pressing problem, and I guess there’s nothing “wrong” with inserting those companies into the backstop procurement market.

But this is an intervention. As Bloomberg put it, “the Trump administration and governors will urge [PJM] to return to market fundamentals after the acute problem is addressed.” For its part, PJM didn’t have much to offer, or at least not initially. “We don’t have a lot to say on this,” a spokesman told Bloomberg. “We were not invited to the event they are apparently having [Friday] and we will not be there.”

I have no idea whether and to what extent this latest idea of Trump’s will help ameliorate the problem, but I do know that at a 30,000-foot level, this is just another example of the resource scarcity and infrastructure strains which look increasingly existential in the 21st century.