With just five weeks to go until President-elect Donald Trump and his allies take full control of America’s executive branch, many of his former antagonists are suddenly attempting to curry favor. How best to do so? By funding the massive inaugural celebration that will mark his return to office, of course.
On Thursday, CNN reported that Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, would be gifting $1 million in cash to the Trump inaugural committee, in addition to an equal in-kind contribution it would make by broadcasting the January 20 festivities on the company’s eponymous streaming video platform.
The donations are just the latest in what has become a concerted effort by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to lessen tensions.
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, became a frequent target of Trump attacks on account of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting into his first administration. The then-president often railed against what he described as the “Amazon Washington Post” on his Twitter (now X) account, and he has been accused of intervening to prevent Amazon from winning a massive cloud computing contract from the Pentagon.
But in recent months, Bezos has taken steps to ease his once-fraught relationship with Trump.
After a gunman came within inches of shooting Trump in the head during a July rally in Pennsylvania, Bezos took to X to praise the then-former president for having shown “tremendous grace and courage under literal fire” after photographs emerged of Trump raising a fist while preventing his Secret Service detail from shielding him properly.
Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 14, 2024
Months later, Bezos also reportedly intervened to prevent his newspaper from issuing an endorsement of Trump’s 2024 election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But the Amazon founder isn’t the only billionaire antagonist now making nice with Trump ahead of his second term.
On Wednesday, Facebook parent company Meta said it had given $1 million to the Trump inaugural effort, just two weeks after Trump and company founder Mark Zuckerberg had dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Zuckerberg — whose platforms once banned Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters — also started taking a softer line with the president-elect after the attempted assassination. In an interview with “The Circuit” podcast, he said seeing Trump “get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag” was “one of the most badass things [he’d] ever seen in [his] life.”
But sympathy for an almost-murdered politician and respect for his post-shooting posturing isn’t necessarily what’s driving the about-face by Zuckerberg and Bezos. Just as likely? It’s fear.
Trump, who spent the last few years running on a platform of revenge and retribution, is now in a position to torment his perceived enemies. Emboldened by a Supreme Court that has granted presidents sweeping immunity for any exercise of official authority, he could direct compliant prosecutors or regulators to deploy the full force of the law against those who displease him — and incur zero consequences for doing so.
In the case of Zuckerberg, these threats aren’t theoretical. In a photo book published this year, Trump actually threatened to imprison him.
Under a photo of the two men taken during a meeting at the White House, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” referring to Zuckerberg’s effort to fund election administration across the US during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Conspiracy theorists and election deniers allied with Trump have accused Zuckerberg of only funding elections in Democratic areas. In reality, the grant money offered by the tycoon’s nonprofit was available to any municipality that asked for it.
But Trump saw the civic engagement funding as something more sinister.
In his book, he wrote that Zuckerberg “told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” referring to false accusations of censorship often leveled against tech platforms by conservatives.
“We are watching him closely, 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,” Trump added.
Notably, Zuckerberg declined to fund any civic engagement efforts during this year’s election. And he’s reaped benefits thus far in terms of access and a potential role in helping the administration shape Artificial Intelligence policy.
Now, with Trump poised to re-enter the White House, he and his fellow tech titans are bending over backwards to make sure Trump won’t even consider following through on the threats he once leveled against them.
It’s not just good business sense, but survival instinct as well.
