At a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.
Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.
Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.
After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, wrote on the social media platform X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of the Los Angeles Times, billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s Cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.
Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co., made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.
Displays of submission aren’t limited to tech and media. Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, agreed to step aside before the end of his 10-year term rather than make Trump fire him. Several Democrats have signaled their willingness to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, seems poised to hack away at our already threadbare safety net.
Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and artificial intelligence, two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are CEOs who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.
Some Democrats appear to think that they might steer DOGE in a productive direction and that, regardless, they’ll get credit for bipartisanship. The electorate, after all, has rendered its verdict on #Resistance.
One of Kamala Harris’ pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in Cabinet positions.”
Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.
“The individual has the intrinsic moral right to live his life in a special and fulfilling way without subordinating to the universal collective,” Marc Andreessen, the software engineer and venture capitalist at the forefront of Silicon Valley’s rightward lurch, wrote on X last week. “Purveyors of abstract guilt must not steal that from you.” Even powerful people who didn’t vote in favor of this harsh new world can find their consolations in it.