The world is waiting to see which Donald Trump shows up on inauguration day, the troublemaker or the dealmaker. He is trying on both roles for size, threatening revenge on those he regards as the “enemy within” and making nice playing footsie with new friends and old foes who are willing to cosy up to him. It’s all going swimmingly.
“The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump said at a news conference on Monday at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. “I don’t know, my personality changed or something.” That’s hardly likely. In Trumpworld, as Michael Corleone says, it’s not personal, it’s business. But there’s also a recognition that Trump earned his victory.
“Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly,” the leading Republican critic, Mitt Romney, admitted on Meet the Press last weekend. “You can’t complain about somebody who does what he said he was going to do.”
It’s significant that Trump used the phrase, “in this term”, as if his second presidency had already started. In his case, it’s justified. Once again, Mar-a-Lago is operating as Trump’s “winter White House”, where he used to entertain the likes of President Xi of China and Shinzo Abe, the late prime minister of Japan. It was quite the spectacle in full view of the club’s paying members. The joining fee has just been raised to $1 million.
The world’s richest men know what is in their interest
Since the 2024 election, foreign dignitaries such as Javier Millei, the chainsaw-wielding Argentine president, and Justin Trudeau, the embattled Canadian prime minister, have joined Trump at Mar-a-Lago – the former to gloat about the election of a fellow populist, the latter to beg for relief from punitive 25 per cent trade tariffs. From afar, Middle Eastern potentates, such as Egypt’s President Sisi, have been in touch with the Trump administration over Gaza and Syria.
In a rare sighting at Mar-a-Lago, Melania was gracious enough to appear at a dinner honoring Akie Abe, the widow of the assassinated Japanese premier. The chief executive of SoftBank was on hand to promise Trump his Japanese company would invest $100 billion in US projects (doubling a similar promise made in 2016).
Mar-a-Lago is where deals are being conducted, scores settled and influence peddled. "Usually, presidents-elect like to either stay on the side and prepare, or act as if they're on the sidelines," Daniel Fried, a former senior State Department official, told Newsweek. With Trump, not a chance. Nigel Farage, the Reform party leader and its new treasurer, Nick Candy, have been wheeling and dealing with Trump’s paymaster Elon Musk over Britain’s political future, no less.
The world’s richest men know what is in their interest. Musk, now a fixture at Mar-a-Lago, has nearly doubled his wealth to $474 billion after investing $275 million in Trump’s re-election. All the tech giants have been trekking – or rather jetting – south to Florida. They include Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerbeg and Apple’s Tim Cook, who has complained to Trump that Apple owes the EU £11 billion in back taxes after a court ruling. Separately, Google has been ordered to cough up £2 billion to Brussels.
Amazon titan Jeff Bezos, now worth a paltry $251 billion compared to Musk, is due to arrive at Mar-a-Lago this week with a promise to donate $1 million of his own money to Trump’s inaugural fund. Zuckerberg and Open AI’s Sam Altman have made the same personal commitment. For this, they will each receive six tickets to “exclusive events”, such as a candle-lit dinner with the Trumps and Vances, and the right to attend the “Starlight” inaugural ball. Amazon is also making an in-kind $ 1 million donation to stream the January 20 swearing-in ceremony on Prime Video.
Timothy Snyder, the well-known Yale historian, has been reminding people of his pamphlet, On Tyranny, published shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Lesson one was: “Do not obey in advance.” But on top of the business advantage of courting Trump, there is the countervailing fear of retribution.
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder and prominent Democrat, is braced for blowback. “I think there’s a greater than 50% chance that there will be repercussions from a misdirection and corruption of the institutions of state to respond to my having tried to get [Kamala] Harris elected,” Hoffman said on the Diary of a CEO podcast.
Amazon got burned during the first Trump presidency when it allegedly lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract because of the Washington Post’s hostile coverage. This time, Bezos, its increasingly impatient owner, chose to spike an editorial endorsing Harris for president rather than to risk Trump’s anger.
The media, once the center of the Trump resistance, is doubly anguished by new directives from its owners
The media, once the center of the Trump resistance, is doubly anguished by new directives from its owners – and the fear of sinking into irrelevance with voters. A Disney executive, Debra Connell, had dinner with Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, shortly before its ABC News subsidiary offered to pay $15 million towards a future Trump presidential museum to settle a defamation case with Trump.
One of their top presenters, George Stephanopolous, had claimed on air that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in a case brought by former agony aunt E Jean Carroll (a jury found him guilty of “sexual abuse” but the judge used the term “rape” in a different context). The climb-down has been described as a surrender to Trump’s threats but it is inconceivable that ABC News would want to fight the newly-elected president in court.
Trump’s lawyers have vowed not to pay a penny of the $83 million in damages owed to Carroll and are threatening to counter sue her for defaming his character. This week Trump launched a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its pollster J Ann Selzer, for running an eve-of-election poll showing him trailing Harris in Iowa, a state he won handsomely. He is also bringing a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News for allegedly “doctoring” an interview (they cut his quotes).
Win or lose, all this is bound to have a chilling effect on the media. Trump critics Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the stars of Morning Joe on MSNBC, have already travelled to Mar-a-Lago in a bid to appease Trump’s anger at their coverage. And the Los Angeles Times’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticising Trump’s cabinet picks and has warned the paper to stop obsessing about the president-elect.
What about Joe Biden? The actual president is barely a spectre at Trump’s feast. Biden issued a perfunctory statement mourning the victims of this week’s school shooting in Wisconsin and lauding his own record on gun control. After pardoning his son Hunter for lying on his application for a gun permit, a period of silence from him on this matter would be welcome.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center and a contributing editor of the Standard
