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The affordability crisis is a hoax, according to President Donald Trump, as he repeatedly brushes off the cost-of-living angst that keeps showing up in polls. Voters disagree: a new AP-NORC survey shows approval of his handling of the economy is at 31 percent, the lowest of his term. Meanwhile, Republican-run states have been busy outlawing actual hoaxes—AI deepfakes that can mislead voters. They are now on the books in roughly half the country.
You might think the two are unrelated, but they aren't. Trump’s new AI order threatens to withhold broadband dollars from states with "onerous" rules, money that disproportionately wires rural, red America. While Trump derides affordability woes as fake, he’s brandishing a lever that could make a very tangible thing—cheap, reliable internet—harder to reach for his own supporters.
Common Knowledge
To Trump and his allies, this is about consolidating national power to compete with China. A fragmented 50-state patchwork supposedly strangles innovation. "I will be doing a ONE RULE Executive Order this week. You can’t expect a company to get 50 approvals every time they want to do something," he posted before signing. The order follows through by creating an AI Litigation Task Force at DOJ and authorizing agencies to condition federal grants, including broadband funds, on states’ AI posture. "We must be unified," Trump said at the signing. Industry-friendly groups welcomed it. "Fifty conflicting state AI laws create a fragmented, innovation-crushing patchwork," says the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
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The left—and a growing bloc of state officials—reacted with alarm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the plan as deeply misguided, designed to punish states trying to address real AI harms. Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman was blunter about the politics: "For all his posturing against Big Tech, Donald Trump is nothing but the industry’s well-paid water boy." Even some conservatives aligned with child-safety groups argue the move cuts out the grassroots: "It doesn’t make sense for a populist movement to cut out the people on the most critical issue of our day," said Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies.
And then there’s the GOP awkwardness. Earlier this year, Republicans floated a 10-year moratorium on state AI rules; it fizzled in Congress and caused blowback from GOP governors wary of Washington second-guessing them. Trump’s order tries to achieve what lawmakers declined to pass.
Uncommon Knowledge
The salient program here is the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD). It is the workhorse of America’s internet expansion. Trump's order explicitly opens the door to conditioning those dollars on a state’s AI laws—a pressure point with very specific, very red geography.
For example, Texas has been initially allocated roughly $3.31 billion—the largest slice in the country. At the same time, the state has enacted the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act (TRAIGA), which sets disclosure rules and guards against certain public-sector AI uses. The state with the biggest broadband assistance is also the kind of state most likely to be squeezed if Washington starts conditioning funds on "acceptable" AI law.
Florida fits the pattern too. Its allocation sits around $1.16 billion, and lawmakers passed a narrow, voter-friendly AI rule requiring disclaimers on AI-assisted political ads—the sort of anti-deepfake curb Republicans often champion. Under the new order’s logic, even targeted, election-integrity measures could become bargaining chips.
Then come the smaller, redder states whose budgets are no less consequential at county level. Arkansas has roughly $1.02 billion on the table even as it broadened protections against AI-generated voice and likeness misuse, designed to stop scam robocalls and synthetic endorsements. Montana is set to receive about $629 million while limiting certain government uses of AI, including manipulation and surveillance. These are far from radical measures. They’re conservative-leaning attempts to police fraud and state power. Yet, under the executive order, they’re precisely the kinds of laws that could invite federal pressure on broadband funds.
At a national level, at least 26 states have enacted election-focused safeguards, typically blackout-period bans or disclosure requirements. Those are, politically speaking, the easiest AI laws to defend. By contrast, Colorado’s broader "high-risk AI" regime, effective next year, goes furthest and is most contentious.
However, it's not just political power on the table. Data centers soaked up about 4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024 and could more than double by 2030; utilities from Texas to Virginia are bracing for record demand, much of it AI-related. Decisions about location, water use, and how to connect these to the grid are dominated by state and local decisions, which is why governors of both parties jealously guard their turf. If Washington starts tying broadband cash to AI-law compliance, it tangles two separate infrastructure fights—data-center siting and rural internet—into one messy brawl.
This is where the irony is. Red states have passed a notable share of the anti-hoax rules. Those same states are banking BEAD dollars to expand internet use. Trump, who now derides affordability as a "hoax," is wielding a tool that could make cheap, reliable internet slower to arrive in the places that vote for him—Texas foremost among them.
There’s a compromise hiding in plain sight. Congress could write a light-touch federal baseline that preempts only the broadest, most duplicative mandates while explicitly preserving state authority over discrete harms (election deepfakes, impersonation, critical-infrastructure risks) and leaving BEAD off-limits. Until then, expect rural counties to ask why their last-mile fiber is being used as leverage in an AI war.
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