Trump: This Time Everybody Wants to be My Friend

Trump’s 2024 victory is panning out completely differently to 2016, when elite America spent four years battling him. “This time everybody wants to be my friend,” notes the President-elect. The Spectator‘s Freddy Gray has more.

This week, Jeff Bezos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The Amazon founder has said he’s “actually very optimistic” about all the regulation slashing that Trump plans to introduce in his second term, and he’s contributed a million dollars to the Trump 47 inauguration fund. …

And Bezos is just one of a number of once-hostile gazillionaires who are now queueing up to honour the Donald. Mark Zuckerberg – or “Zuckerbucks”, as Trump calls him – spent the years between 2016 and 2020 grovelling to the political class for Facebook’s role in Trump’s election and the spread of Right-wing populism across the world. …

Yet this year, Zuckerberg has gone to some lengths to suck up to the Donald. After Trump’s brave response to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Zuckerberg called him a “badass”. The two men have also had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, has also given one million dollars to the Trump inauguration fund.

So did Perplexity, the AI search engine. So did Uber. So did Sam Altman, the Chief Executive of OpenAI. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” said Altman. …

Trump has noticed that the elite mood music has changed in his favour since 2016. “The first term everybody was fighting me,” he said on Monday. “This term everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know. My personality changed or something.”

Silicon Valley’s pivot towards Trump is spearheaded, of course, by Elon Musk, the billionaire-in-chief. Tech moguls, even ones that dislike Musk, are very excited about his and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency agenda. That’s probably why Apple’s Chief Executive, Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin have also been to dinner at Mar-a-Lago of late.

Worth reading in full.