Quick Take

Appeasement Watch: Meta’s Troubling Donation to Trump’s Inaugural Fund

Paul M. Barrett

December 12, 2024

Determined to distinguish itself in the corporate scramble to please the incoming president, Meta has announced that is will contribute $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural celebration.

The announcement follows Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ritual appearance at Mar-a-Lago several weeks ago to congratulate the president-elect. It also comes amid an industry-wide trend among tech CEOs seeking to appease Trump, who has frequently lashed out at Silicon Valley based on the baseless myth that it has conspired to “censor” conservatives. I wrote about this appeasement earlier this week in an op-ed for The Hill.

“Appease” is a strong word, often associated with momentous world events, such as the British policy in the 1930s of allowing Hitler to expand Nazi German territory unchecked. But the word also has a broader meaning, as described by the Cambridge English Dictionary: “to prevent further disagreement or fighting by letting the opposing side have something that they want.”

What Trump wants at this stage is for powerful institutions, including major corporations, to “obey in advance,” in the words of Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, the definitive primer on how authoritarians operate — and succeed. “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,” Snyder writes.

Zuckerberg presents an especially egregious case. He was prominent in the ranks of corporate leaders who condemned then-President Trump in 2021 for inciting a violent attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election. “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg wrote on Jan. 7, 2021, justifying Trump’s temporary banishment from Facebook. “His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the U.S. and around the world.”

But, as I wrote for The Hill, “since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg and the chief executives of other leading U.S. technology companies, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, all of whom publicly expressed disapproval of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the politicians who encouraged it, have rushed to congratulate the president-elect and hail opportunities to collaborate with his administration.”

The tech CEOs’ precise goals may vary, I added: “Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon all face federal antitrust lawsuits they may hope Trump will modify or drop. [Elon] Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has billions of dollars in ongoing contracts with the U.S. government and could benefit from closer federal ties. Zuckerberg may be trying to repair his damaged relationship with the Trump camp, which has joined other conservatives in Washington in accusing the company of censoring right-leaning viewpoints. Trump himself has threatened Zuckerberg with prison for supposedly plotting against him during the 2020 election….

“Business leaders are not obliged at this point to go to the barricades in opposition to the president-elect. But rather than scramble to curry favor with a president who has demonstrated disregard for democratic norms and aggressively sought to undermine the rule of law — features of American democracy that have allowed business to flourish — tech CEOs should call for Trump to exercise prudence and moderation as he returns to power. They have not done that; nor have they chosen the even more cautious alternative of maintaining a watchful silence while waiting to see whether the new president acts on his more unsettling rhetoric.”

With apologies for repeating myself, I’ll add that the Trump team is not a conventional incoming administration. More is at stake than the usual corporate lobbying for government contracts or lower tax rates.

This is not a time for business as usual.