'Everyone wants to be my friend': Ex-critics 'falling in line' with 'craven' appeals to Trump

17 December 2024

After Donald Trump narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the United States' 2024 presidential election, some major CEOs who have been critical of him at times — including Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook/Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — reached out to the president-elect.

The New York Times' Michelle Goldberg describes a trend of "capitulation" to Trump in her December 16 column, noting that he specifically mentioned Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google founder Sergey Brin during his Monday press conference at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump told reporters, "In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend." And Trump, according to Goldberg, was "not exaggerating" when he said that.

"Since Trump won reelection — 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," the liberal Times columnist laments. "Call it the Great Capitulation."

Goldberg notes that Zuckerberg suspended Trump's Facebook account after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building; now, he's offering "a million-dollar donation to Trump's inauguration."

"After Time Magazine declared Trump 'Person of the Year,' the publication’s owner, the Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, wrote on X, 'This marks a time of great promise for our nation," Goldberg observes. "The owner of The L.A. Times, the 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."

Goldberg continues, "Most shocking of all, last week, ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, 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."

The columnist points out that "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," Goldberg argues. "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 AI, 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."

Michelle Goldberg's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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