Donald Trump didn’t win the 2024 election in a landslide, but that hasn’t stopped him from claiming an electoral mandate. If that ever held water, it doesn’t anymore. With the stock market plunging from ill-advised global tariffs, Trump’s public approval has already sunk into the negatives.
But many of the largest companies in the United States—through fear or favor—are acting like Trump does have the mandate he claims, that his ideological will deserves deference. If the 2016 election was followed by even a modicum of resistance-styled liberalism by American employers, the 2024 election has been followed by something closer to a corporate MAGA orthodoxy.
In media, technology, academia, and throughout the private sector, America’s companies are lining up to prostrate themselves before Trump and kiss the ring.
While Trump the candidate was flanked by business figures like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick—both of whom joined his administration—the real ring-kissing began in earnest in the lead-up to the inauguration, when companies lined up to donate millions to Trump’s inaugural fund. Trump raised a record $170 million, including $1 million gifts from Silicon Valley giants such as Amazon and Meta, plus OpenAI CEO and Democratic donor Sam Altman.
At the inauguration were Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew. If these men aren’t actively competing for government contracts, they’re hoping to help craft—or outright avoid—regulation.
Oh, how things change quickly. In a book published in August, Trump suggested that Zuckerberg would face life in prison if he plotted against Trump in the 2024 election. And in 2019, Amazon wrote in a legal complaint that it lost a government contract after Trump attacked Bezos—his “perceived enemy.”
In the media, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, interfered to stop a presidential endorsement of Harris and recently ordered that the opinion page shift to defending civil liberties and free markets, leading to resignations. Meanwhile, billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has made similar steps rightward, introducing a “bias meter” to track ideological bents at the paper. But more worrying have been settlements from CBS and ABC with Trump that many critics deemed unnecessary and preemptive—in CBS’s case to help its parent company Paramount win regulatory approval for a merger with Skydance.
Trump’s disdain for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs has even led companies of all stripes to dismantle their own. Companies like PepsiCo, Meta, and Walmart have softened or rolled back their DEI program in recent months, as Trump has railed against the programs.
But perhaps the most worrying development came at a private university. After the Trump administration cut $400 million in funding to Columbia University, the school cooperated with the unexplained detention of campus protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, a move that civil liberties advocates have said threatens free speech and due process in this country.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that not everyone is playing dead. Some are refusing to go along with the new status quo. Costco and Delta Airlines have reaffirmed their commitments to DEI, and Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote in Slate that “neutrality” toward Trump’s authoritarian policies is a “betrayal of our academic mission.”
Trump won’t be in power forever, but the companies that eagerly courted his favor may be remembered less for strategic pragmatism than for moral compromise.
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