This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 7 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
With less than two weeks until Donald Trump takes office, an actual real-life — not metaphorical — oligarchy is coalescing around the president-elect. It’s pretty unprecedented in the context of the United States and ominous in many respects, but it is also a genuinely clarifying development for the pro-democracy coalition, especially as it prepares its opposition to the second Trump administration.
I think there’s a recent historical parallel for this that could be instructive: The George W. Bush years after 9/11. It’s easy to forget now that before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was not an especially popular president. He had lost the popular vote but won the election, in large part thanks to his brother’s government in Florida and a Republican Supreme Court that his father had helped put together.
There is something clarifying about the Trump tech oligarchy coalescing around him.
But all that changed on a dime after the attacks on America. Days after 9/11, Bush’s approval had skyrocketed to nearly 90%. All of a sudden, everyone seemed to decide this guy was a great, brilliant, courageous hero and the country was willing to get behind him. You saw the whole of American society falling in line behind him, from the media to the corporate boardrooms to the country music charts.
In some ways, there was something clarifying about being in that dissident minority at that time. All the powerful people were on one side and you were on the other. That minority, which I was a part of, was convinced Bush and all the powerful people siding with him were wrong and we were right.
History bore that out and, eventually, people would come around to that view. By the time he imploded the economy in the Great Recession, Bush’s approval rating bottomed out at 25% and everyone would pretend they had nothing to do with him.
I think we are witnessing a similar moment after Trump’s election — though, thankfully it’s not quite as bad as post-9/11 America. There is something clarifying about the Trump tech oligarchy coalescing around him.
Even before the election, the world’s richest man, billionaire Elon Musk, was inseparable from Trump. There’s also Musk’s one-time PayPal colleague, Peter Thiel, who has been a longtime benefactor to incoming Vice President JD Vance.
But things shifted into top gear after November. This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook went out of his way to donate $1 million of his personal money to Trump’s inauguration. That was an unprecedented donation for Cook but it matches the amounts given to Trump’s inauguration by Amazon, Meta, the CEO of Uber, and the founder of OpenAI.
And now, The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has found itself in some controversy. Last week, Ann Telnaes, a political satirist at the paper drew up a cartoon lampooning all the tech billionaires prostrating themselves before Trump.
That cartoonist ultimately quit her job after she says the paper refused to publish it. In a statement, David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, said that he respected Telnaes but “must disagree with her interpretation of events.”
Shipley went on to say his decision was “guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
The next day, it was reported that the other part of the Bezos empire, Amazon, was paying a whopping $40 million to license and stream a vanity documentary about Melania Trump.
All of that is insane. But then came an announcement from Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. On Tuesday, the founder of one of the world’s biggest social media empires declared he is ending content fact-checking, a practice they have done for years on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
Separately, Zuckerberg also just promoted Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative who served as George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, to global policy director for Meta. Zuckerberg also added a new member to the Meta board of directors, UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter and friend.
That did not sit well with a lot of Facebook employees, who criticized the move internally. Those employees said the free speech platform deleted their comments, according to new reporting by 404 Media.
It seems pretty obvious why you’d make all these moves, to curry favor with the big guy and his political partisans. But it’s also worth recalling why Meta had to institute its soon-to-be-former fact-checking policy in the first place.
They didn’t do all this fact-checking stuff out of nowhere. They did it because starting in 2016, Facebook was used to promote violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority by the military government of Myanmar. Tens of thousands of people were murdered. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless.
An in-depth Reuters investigation found the hateful language and the calls for violence that fueled the massacres were systematically promoted by bad actors: “The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated.”
“A United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had ‘turned into a beast,’” Reuters reported.
Imagine having to tweak your product because you realized that libelous, violent incitement on your platform spurred the mass slaughter of an ethnic minority. It was big news at the time. Zuckerberg was raked across the coals by senators in open hearings on Capitol Hill.
That was when the Facebook billionaire realized content moderation was good or, at least, necessary. Something he had to reiterate again after Jan. 6, 2021, when it became obvious that Trump and his allies used Facebook to spread election lies and organize the rallies that would become a Capitol insurrection.
Zuckerberg is rolling it all back to placate the incoming president he once banned.
After that, Meta banned Trump from its platforms — a move Zuckerberg openly defended at the time, saying that Trump had used their platforms to incite a violent insurrection.
But now, Zuckerberg is rolling it all back to placate the incoming president he once banned. An incoming president who, just months ago, wrote that Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election and said the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he crossed Trump again.
Do you think that swayed Zuckerberg? I don’t know. But Trump has a theory. On Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump whether he believed Zuckerberg was directly responding to his threats. “Probably,” Trump responded. “Yeah. Probably.”
There is no question that Zuckerberg, Bezos and Cook all want to avoid the ire of Trump but that is only part of the story. They have empires of their own to preserve and expand. They see an opportunity to cement a tech oligarchy in which the leader’s favorite billionaires run the country. It worked for Musk, why shouldn’t it work for them?
I think that’s a wildly dystopian vision, one that most Americans reject. These are the anti-democratic forces of concentrated power and they are all aligning in the open, in front of our faces. It’s chilling in its own way, but also it’s very clarifying to have them all standing on the same side.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Become a member to join the discussion