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.
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.
