Zuck's Gift to Trump is an Opportunity for Democrats

If Trump wants to be the president of big business, Democrats should be the party that will stand up to powerful corporations.

Corporate America’s slavish efforts to cozy up to Donald Trump haven’t been subtle. Prominent CEOs continue flocking to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the incoming President. Several of America’s largest companies have donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration. There is a bidding war to see who can quickly curry the most favor. Most egregiously, in the last 24 hours, Meta and Amazon — two companies that were in Trump’s crosshairs for years — undertook some disgusting moves to endear themselves to Trump.

According to the New York Times:

Meta on Tuesday announced changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively end a fact-checking program instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information. The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins.

Just in case Trump, his allies, or anyone else missed Mark Zuckerberg’s incredibly awkward video, in which he is dressed like a divorced dad who recently took up DJing as a hobby, Meta dispatched its newly appointed Vice President for Policy to appear on Fox and Friends to discuss the new policy and named Trump BFF and UFC President Dana White to the company's board of directors.

Not to be outdone, Jeff Bezos and Amazon concocted a scheme to funnel money directly to Melania Trump. Puck’s Matt Belloni reported on Monday night:

Amazon will release a Melania Trump documentary directed by Brett Ratner, the Rush Hour filmmaker who has not made a Hollywood movie since 2018, when he was accused of sexual malfeasance by several women.

Even more interesting: Amazon is paying a cool $40 million to license the film, per three sources familiar with the deal. That price includes the Ratner documentary, which will get a small theatrical release and then appear on Prime Video, plus a previously undisclosed two-to-three-episode follow-up docuseries on the first lady. Melania will participate in both projects. (Amazon declined to comment.) That’s quite a payday for Mrs. Trump.

It’s vomit-inducing. Eight years ago, most major corporations were concerned about being in close vicinity to Trump. Don’t get me wrong, they wanted their tax cuts and fewer regulations, but they believed there was a brand risk in being tied to the guy who bragged about sexual assault, attacked Gold Star families, and called Nazis “very fine people.”

No longer.

Meta and Amazon are at the forefront of a larger trend. Major corporations and billionaires are becoming supplicants for Trump. I suspect that, in the end, these folks will regret their decision to buddy up with a dangerous demagogue. In the interim, Democrats must understand that these corporations are not our allies or friends. They have made their allegiances clear. Time to adopt a more populist message and agenda while portraying Republicans as the party of corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Mask-Off Moment

During Trump’s first term, Democrats believed that some corporations (and especially Big Tech companies) should be our allies against MAGA extremism. Many of these CEOs and founders opposed Trump in the 2016 campaign — some were big donors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The tech companies claimed to value diversity, support immigration reform and efforts to fight climate change. They should have been on our side in a fight against a racist, anti-immigrant climate change denier.

Progressives exhausted valuable time and energy pressuring Facebook, Tesla, Twitter, and others to live up to their self-professed values. We wanted these companies to speak out against Trump and enforce their own policies against disinformation and hate speech. There were some victories in this effort. Under immense pressure, Facebook and YouTube banned dangerous conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones; and all of the platforms banned Trump after he incited the January 6th riot. But ultimately, Facebook et al failed to do the right thing for one reason and one reason only: these companies only care about shareholder value. In the first Trump term, they maintained the patina of progressivism and made as much money as humanly possible. In the second Trump term, they are comfortable being explicitly pro-Trump.

Despite this, Democrats can benefit if we have the wherewithal to take advantage of it.

Solving the Insider Problem

Thanks to a confluence of unforeseen events, a series of understandable but mistaken strategic choices, a sincere desire to defend norms, and then running Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — two dyed-in-the-wool institutionalists — in consecutive elections, the Democrats inadvertently became the party of institutions. We were the defenders of government, the media, and a broken political system. Trump won for many reasons. Foremost among them was the idea that Trump would upend a broken system. According to the exit polls, 28% of voters said that the ability to bring needed change was most important to their vote. Trump won those voters by 50 points.

The axis of politics is no longer Left/Right; it’s inside/outside. Trump is misreading the electoral results and surrounding himself with elite institutions and individuals who he ran against. In addition to buddying up with Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump appointed 13 different billionaires to serve in his administration. If Trump wants to be pro-corporation and pro-billionaire, Democrats can — and must — position themselves as the opposite. The public is still very angry about the state of affairs. These corporations are in league with Trump, and we need to explain why.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump are giving Democrats an opportunity to get on the right side of public opinion.