'Challenge accepted': MAGA officials tried to 'stiffen Trump’s spine' against Meta CEO

14 April

President Donald Trump with Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on September 19, 2019 (Rawpixel.com/ Shutterstock.com)

Although Silicon Valley billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — whose Meta owns the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram — was critical of President Donald Trump in the past, he reached out to him after the 2024 election and attended Trump's inauguration. Zuckerberg has met with Trump three times in 2025, but according to Semafor reporter Ben Smith, some of the Meta CEO's "key antagonists in the federal government" showed up in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, April 8.

Smith, in an article published on April 14, explains, "The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement. Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump's spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta."

According to Smith, a third Trump ally was present as well: far-right MAGA attorney Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project.

Davis is known for his inflammatory attacks on not only Democrats, but also, on conservatives he considers insufficiently MAGA.

"While none of the participants in the meeting with Trump would share its contents," Smith reports, "Davis appeared to refer to it in a pair of X posts last Tuesday: 'Challenge accepted,' he posted at 1:32 pm, responding to a Trump supporter's concern that Zuckerberg had the White House 'on lock.' That evening, Davis replied to his own post: 'Mission accomplished.'"

Davis recently railed against Zuckerberg during an appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast.

The attorney told Bannon, "Mark Zuckerberg rigged and stole the 2020 election, and that's why President Trump got chased out of the WH, why he faced 4 years of unprecedented, republic-ending lawfare…. I just can’t believe that President Trump would let Mark Zuckerberg go into the Oval Office and take down his pants."

Read the full Semafor article at this link.

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