Over the past month, we’ve learned that Donald Trump’s inauguration fund has received million-dollar donations from, among others, Google, Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Apple boss Tim Cook. Hard to know whether it’s encouraging or quite the opposite to find them being so public about it. Traditionally when industrialists have made knee-bending gestures to incoming self-confessed authoritarians, they’ve preferred to do it in a back room somewhere, rather than on a publicly available list that also risks implying they like Carrie Underwood’s music.
So let’s deal first with the entertainers. Underwood will perform at Trump’s inauguration, having previously insisted it was absolutely impossible to put her in some kind of ideological box. “I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she mused a few years ago. “I try to stay far out of politics if possible, at least in public, because nobody wins. It’s crazy. Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.” Update: it now is like that.
Also singing the president-elect into office will be the Village People, which sounds like a mad idea chucked out at an improv night, but turns out to be a thing that will actually happen multiple times during the inauguration celebrations. The Village People confirmed the news in a post beginning with the words “We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear …”, seemingly at least aware that this could be viewed as the biggest betrayal of a fanbase since Michael Jackson claimed he was simply building a fairground to entertain his.
Anyway: to the organ grinders. Who will run the country while Trump is cheating at golf, with any number of wingnuts and our post-moral tech bros jockeying for position? You have to feel almost impressed at Trump for alighting on the only people who could do a less appealing job of it than him, like Ellen DeGeneres getting the emperor Tiberius to do her holiday cover.
Even before it makes landfall, the incoming regime is host to weirder bedfellows than a Mos Eisley brothel. The likes of would-be health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr was an environmental lawyer for decades, but his oil-based anger is currently only permitted to be misdirected at seed oils, while Trump prepares to drill, baby, drill. Arguably the most eye-catching face-off, however, is the feud between Trump’s new best friend, Elon Musk, and his old best friend, Steve Bannon, who days before last November’s election emerged from a federal jail as one of the few inmates in history to have got less ripped during incarceration. Last week Bannon declared that Musk was “a truly evil guy … I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more”. Strong words, if not attached to any discernible levers of control. Bannon also inquired of Musk, Trump’s crypto and AI tsar, David Sacks, and the Palantir chair, Peter Thiel: “Why do we have white South Africans, the most racist people in the world, commenting on everything that happens in the United States?”
Regrettably this was not a question answered the next day in a truly spellbinding Financial Times column by Thiel. To read it was to feel like you were stuck at 2am in the tightest corner of the house party kitchen with a guy who had done enough cocaine to float the acronym DISC – the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, apparently – but sadly not quite enough to immediately fatally overdose.
Meanwhile, days out from Trump’s inauguration and it feels a little late for Zuckerberg to be trying to be the fairest tech bro of them all. And yet: the Meta boss is really, really trying. Last week he announced he would be getting rid of factcheckers and recommending much more political content across his platforms, perhaps partly in response to Trump’s previous threat that if he made trouble for him, Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison”.
People talk a lot about how angry they are that Zuckerberg has shown no backbone, which means even more when they say it on their Facebook accounts. But even considering Zuckerberg in terms of principles is a category mistake, like trying to work out what friction or gravity “believes in”. In retrospect, the writing was on the wall the second Mark commenced his aesthetic reimagining of himself. For his frequent Washington committee summonses under the Biden administration, Zuckerberg used to dress like a boy playing Patrick Bateman in a middle-school musical version of American Psycho. But last year, something changed. He’s been de-manscaped and now wears obnoxiously sloganed baggy black T-shirts and fuck-you watches. Mark’s the only mega-rich person in the world to have deliberately got himself a glow-down.
Strange to remember all the batshit plotlines of the past couple of years. Not so long ago, it was Musk scrambling to retain power over the conversation. “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,” wrote Elon, who then spent the next 18 months positioning himself as American democracy’s “other option”. But his angst back then was prompted by the fact that Meta had launched Threads – too Twitter-like a product, apparently. And so it was that Elon challenged Mark to a cage fight. Zuckerberg accepted the challenge, with efforts to stage the fight made by UFC chief Dana White. Who, inevitably, is now a Meta board member and feature of the incoming president’s inner circle.
In the end, though, it ended up being a lot of talk that came to nothing. And on the basis of all the above and so, so much more … I sincerely hope I’m going to be typing those words a lot over the next four years.
