Elites' capitulation: Trump's second term reshapes America's power dynamics

With tech CEOs and other elites bowing to Mr Trump, the air is going out of the old liberal order

By Michelle Goldberg  At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.  Since Mr Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.  Following January 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Mr Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Mr Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” January 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Mr Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Mr Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.  After Time magazine declared Mr Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The Los Angeles Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticising Mr Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.  Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Mr Trump.  As you may remember, a jury last year found Mr Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing the writer E Jean Carroll. In a memorandum, the judge in the case explained that while a jury didn’t find that Mr Trump had raped Ms Carroll, it was operating under New York criminal law, which defines rape solely as “vaginal penetration by a penis.” It did find that he’d forcibly penetrated her with his fingers.  “The finding that Ms Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” wrote the judge. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that.”  The ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos appeared to be using this broader definition when, in March, he said on-air that a jury had found Mr Trump “liable for rape.” Mr Trump, who regularly threatens, and sometimes files, defamation cases against his perceived enemies in the press, sued. And though his case seemed absurdly weak, ABC News decided to settle in exchange for a $15 million donation to Mr Trump’s future presidential library or museum, $1 million in legal fees and a public statement of regret from Mr Stephanopoulos and the network.  Displays of submission aren’t limited to tech and media. Christopher Wray, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agreed to step aside before the end of his 10-year term rather than make Mr Trump fire him. Several Democrats have signalled their willingness to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, seems poised to hack away at our already threadbare safety net.  In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote of the current administration’s refusal, at least so far, to renew the humanitarian parole of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela and Haiti to possibly shield them from deportation under Mr Trump. “For a president who considers Mr Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate,” Mr Blitzer wrote.  Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and artificial intelligence, two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are CEOs who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.  Some Democrats appear to think that they might steer DOGE in a productive direction and that, regardless, they’ll get credit for bipartisanship. The electorate, after all, has rendered its verdict on #Resistance.  One of Kamala Harris’s pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Mr Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions.”  Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Mr Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.  “The individual has the intrinsic moral right to live his life in a special and fulfilling way without subordinating to the universal collective,” Marc Andreessen, the software engineer and venture capitalist at the forefront of Silicon Valley’s rightward lurch, wrote on X last week. “Purveyors of abstract guilt must not steal that from you.” Even powerful people who didn’t vote in favour of this harsh new world can find their consolations in it.  ©2024 The New York Times News Service