Oligarchs board the Trump train

Have the plutocrats of the internet age finally realized that all Donald Trump wanted was their love?

This week, Jeff Bezos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The Amazon founder has said he’s “actually very optimistic” about all the regulation slashing that Trump plans to introduce in his second term, and he’s contributed $1 million to the Trump 47 inauguration fund.

Jeff and Donald have come a long way in eight years. Bezos’s Washington Post was a leading voice of the anti-Trump resistance between 2016 and this year. The paper changed its slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in 2017 as a sort of clarion call against what it perceived as the ills of Trumpism. Amazon and Trump have had legal battles, too. For now, however, that’s old news.

And Bezos is just one of a number of once-hostile gazillionaires who are now lining up to honor the Donald. Mark Zuckerberg — or “Zuckerbucks,” as Trump calls him — spent the years between 2016 and 2020 groveling to the political class for Facebook’s role in Trump’s election and the spread of right-wing populism across the world. In Trump’s newish coffee-table book, Saving America, he accuses Zuckerberg of being at the center of the plot to steal the 2020 election from him because of the $400 million Zuckerberg donated to funding “election integrity that year.

“We are watching him closely,” wrote Trump, “and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Yet this year, Zuckerberg has gone to some lengths to suck up to the Donald. After Trump’s brave response to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Zuckerberg called him a “badass.” The two men have also had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, has also given one million dollars to the Trump inauguration fund.

So did Perplexity, the AI search engine. So did Uber. So did Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” said Altman.

Trump has noticed that the elite mood music has changed in his favor since 2016

Apparently all these million-dollar donors will get special perks at the inaugural jamboree: an “elegant and intimate dinner” with the president, First Lady Melania Trump and perhaps Vice President J.D. Vance on January 19. Top donors will also be invited to an inter-faith “One America, One Light Sunday Service,” also featuring Donald and Melania, as well as some brass bands. If you’re very rich, it’s your manifest destiny to be there.

Trump has noticed that the elite mood music has changed in his favor since 2016. “The first term everybody was fighting me,” he said on Monday. “This term everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know. My personality changed or something.”

Silicon Valley’s pivot towards Trump is spearheaded, of course, by Elon Musk, the billionaire-in-chief. Tech moguls, even ones that dislike Musk, are very excited about his and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency agenda. That’s probably why Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin have also been to dinner at Mar-a-Lago of late. It’s all very elegant, in Trump’s mind. It’s also obviously slimy to most people.

Oligarchy dies in the light. Maybe that’s Trump’s real role in global politics, a purpose he perhaps half-understands: to reveal all the shallowness, greed and stinking hypocrisy of the twenty-first-century elite for all the world to see. He’s an Open Source Corrupter, as it were. Yet a question still troubles some MAGA loyalists: the tech overlords spent years fighting Trump, yet he succeeded. Now they are behind him, might he fail?

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