Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, has described the tech titans gathering at Monday’s inauguration as “supplicants” to Donald Trump making “an official surrender”, akin to the Japanese surrender to allied forces on the deck of the USS Missouri in September 1945.
Bannon, who served as architect of Trump’s 2016 presidential win but later fell out with the president-elect after he criticized his intellect and members of his family, told ABC News in an interview airing Sunday that Trump “broke the oligarchs” who had previously been aligned against him.
Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are expected to be at Trump’s second inauguration, having already visited him at Mar-a-Lago. They, or the firms they founded or represent, have given generously to Trump’s inaugural fund.
“Jeff Bezos came,” Trump said last week. “Bill Gates came. Mark Zuckerberg came. Many of them came numerous times. The bankers have all come. Everybody is coming.”
Bannon, who served four months in jail for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating January 6, told the outlet that the tech power-players lined up after Mark Zuckerberg visited Trump and said he would attend the inauguration. Zuckerberg had previously barred Trump from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram after the 2021 US Capitol riots.
Zuckerberg later said he was “grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming administration”.
Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”
“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.
The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.
But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.
“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.
Biden, Turner added, “enabled, benefited from and emboldened the system that threatens us all, while he will ride off into the sunset and won’t feel the harms of what’s been built”.
Biden’s comments came in the shade of Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook and Instagram were dropping their factchecking services and would rely on a system of community-contributed notes.
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Zuckerberg said the decision was made because Facebook’s factchecking, brought in in December 2016, had done more harm than good in terms of public trust.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Biden hit back, calling the decision a “really shameful” choice.
Zuckerberg also accused the Biden White House of pressuring Facebook to censor certain topics and posts, particularly around Covid vaccines.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” he told the podcaster Joe Rogan. “It just got to this point where we were like: ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’”
Zuckerberg said he was not against vaccines per se. But he told Rogan that while the Biden administration was “trying to push” the Covid-19 vaccination program, “they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it”.