Ceremony reveals where power truly lies. In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. yesterday, as Donald Trump was sworn back into office, the pecking order of the new regime was very clear indeed.
Seated in front of the incoming Cabinet were the tech titans and (a courtesy granted to very few) their wives and partners. There they all were: Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Meta; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Sergey Brin, its co-founder.
As if to rub it in, senior Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida – once frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination – and Greg Abbott of Texas were pointedly exiled to an overflow room. Last Wednesday, Joe Biden warned in his farewell address of the coming of a new “tech-industrial complex”. In truth, it is already here.
Since Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris, the MAGA court at Mar-a-Lago in Florida has resembled a festival of deference. And – against stiff competition – no group of flatterers have been as attentive or craven as the tech moguls. The presidential ring must be worn out from all the kisses.
Musk, who donated $277 million to the Republican party in the elections, has been resident at the resort, helping Trump make appointments, speaking to foreign heads of government with him, and beginning the cost-cutting work of the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Marc Andreesen, the venture capital tycoon and long-time associate of Musk, has also spent much of his time at “Dark Camelot”, helping the transition team and hailing “morning in America” in podcast interviews. The inauguration itself was heavily subsidised by tech tycoons: Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and Cook each donated $1 million.
Zuckerberg, in particular, has been shameless in his bid to please Trump
The contrast with Trump’s first presidency could scarcely be more vivid. In 2017, Zuckerberg was squarely on the defensive, as Russia was accused of exploiting Facebook on an industrial scale to promote Trump’s chances of defeating Hillary Clinton. Musk told CNBC in November 2016 that Trump “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States”. When he first pulled the US out of the Paris climate change agreement – as he did again by executive order last night – Musk resigned in protest from two presidential advisory councils.
The owner of X has made his own very personal journey to the Right, animated by a fixation with the “woke mind virus” and what he regarded as “fascist” measures taken during the pandemic. Last night, it was Musk himself who was recklessly performing what resembled a fascist salute at the post-inauguration rally.
More generally, the tech sector became deeply disillusioned with Biden and his alleged lack of support for enterprise and cutting-edge enterprise. Zuckerberg, in particular, has been shameless in his bid to please Trump and remodel Meta’s core principles to suit the new political landscape.
So: out with fact-checking and his global policy chief, Sir Nick Clegg. In with free speech (and, by Zuckerberg’s admission, more “bad stuff”) and Clegg’s replacement, veteran Republican Joel Kaplan. As an explicit quid pro quo, the Meta chief wants Trump to put the full might of the US state squarely behind his objective “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
Sooner or later, the alliance between tech and Trump will fracture, not least because the egos involved are so colossal
Though Trump has never been remotely tech-literate, he is happy to be told that artificial intelligence is the next American frontier and that deregulated crypto could spark a new gold rush. He has even launched his own meme coin, $Trump – a cryptocurrency with absolutely no true value – that now, in theory and on paper alone, accounts for nearly 90 percent of his net worth.
Ever the showman, he also intuited that the shiny futurism of Big Tech is a useful theatrical counterweight to MAGA’s reactionary nationalism. Hence, the toe-curling digression in his election-night acceptance speech about one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets: “I said: ‘Only Elon can do this, it must be an Elon’”.
He has cut through the conundrum of TikTok’s future, simply announcing – before he was back in office – that he would postpone the legislative ban that was upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as Friday. This tells you all you need to know about the president’s priorities. He may be concerned by the security and privacy implications of a social media platform controlled by Beijing. But he set much greater store by the despair and fury of 170 million Americans denied the addictive app for 12 hours.
Sooner or later, the alliance between tech and Trump will fracture, not least because the egos involved are so colossal. There is also an absolute incompatibility between the economic nationalism of the MAGA base and the libertarianism of Silicon Valley – a tension which has already flared in a row over the H1B visa scheme between Musk and old-school Trump allies like Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist and presenter of the influential War Room podcast.
For now, however, the 45th and 47th president has surrounded himself with a crew of high-tech robber barons, a gang that is already too powerful and will soon become even more so. They have identified in Trump a politician who appears uninterested in history, morality or accountability: making him the perfect prospective enabler of the next phase of their project to dominate the world in every sector.
Yesterday Trump achieved the most dramatic comeback in modern political history. But he will only be in office for four years. The ceremony also marked the inauguration of a new American oligarchy ruthlessly planning a gilded age for the digital few that will last much longer and, freed from restraint, do exactly as it pleases.
Matthew d’Ancona is a columnist for the London Standard
