Donald Trump looks on during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on 16 November 2024 in New York City.
People from tech executives to foreign leaders and even some mainstream media figures are ‘acquiescing in advance’, experts say, because of greed and fear
When “Justice for All”, a dirge-like version of the national anthem sung by defendants jailed over their alleged roles in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, was played last month at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, guests stood with hand on heart.
Among them was Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook.
Although it is not clear if Zuckerberg knew the back story of how this tinny version version of The Star-Spangled Banner was recorded over a prison phone line, his mere presence at Donald Trump’s “winter White House” said it all. Facebook had banned Trump after the shocking events of January 6. Now Zuckerberg had come to kiss the ring.
He is far from alone in what has been dubbed “the great capitulation” following Trump’s re-election. Tech chief executives, media organisations and foreign leaders are seeking the president-elect’s favor through donations, self-censorship and appeasement. Analysts say the surrender is driven by a combination of greed, fear of Trump’s unfettered power and a belief that resistance is futile.
“Part of the shock of the Trump win is how quickly and how many people in various areas, from the media to politicians, are acquiescing in advance,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “People are resigning themselves to self-preservation over the good of maintaining a free and fair democracy and resisting Trump.”
It is an astonishing turnaround. When Trump was impeached in the wake of the January 6 riot nearly four years ago, he appeared to be a political pariah. Dozens of major corporations publicly pledged to freeze their financial contributions to 147 Republican members of Congress who had voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Earlier this year Trump became the first former US president convicted of a crime and had three more cases looming over him. Over the years he has has been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their private parts, accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women and found liable by a jury for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll.
He’s entering office is the most powerful president in American historySteve Schmidt, political strategist
And yet his victory over Kamala Harris in the 5 November election has seemingly expunged his record in the eyes of the rich and powerful. He returns to the White House with the momentum of victory in the national popular vote, a supreme court ruling that implies presidents are above the law and diehard loyalists in the White House and Congress.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “He’s entering office is the most powerful president in American history. He is an American Caesar, unrestrained. Trump has made a threat and said, I’m coming after people, and he’s appointed people that will do what he wants without him having to tell them to do it.”
Many of those who once condemned him are eager to cosy up to an incoming president who offers both a carrot – tax cuts, deregulation, business friendly appointees – and a stick. Trump mused to reporters at Mar-a-Lago: “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know, my personality changed or something.”
The New York Stock Exchange welcomed Trump to ring its opening bell. Time magazine and the Financial Times newspaper anointed Trump their “person of the year”. Bret Stephens, a longtime Trump foe, wrote this week in the New York Times that Never Trumpers had “overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose”.
A parade of chief executives have travelled to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee to Trump. Along with Meta chief executive Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made the pilgrimage. Meta, Amazon, Uber and Open AI chief Sam Altman are all reportedly donating $1m to the fund for the inauguration on 20 January.
Bezos, a onetime critic of Trump’s rhetoric, now says he is “optimistic” about Trump’s second term while also endorsing his plans to cut regulations. As owner of the Washington Post newspaper, Bezos killed an endorsement of Harris during the presidential election. The Post is struggling to find a new executive editor amid fears it will no longer live up to the “Democracy dies in darkness” slogan it championed during Trump’s first term.
Other profit-focused media owners have been trying to build bridges with a president-elect who repeatedly dubbed them the “enemy of the people”. The Disney-owned ABC News agreed to pay $15m toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a seemingly flimsy defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air assertion that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll.
The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, has reportedly interfered with editorial decisions, demanding opposing viewpoints be presented alongside negative coverage. Comcast’s plan to spin off MSNBC and other cable TV channels into a separate company has raised further concerns about the liberal network, whose ratings are tanking.
The way some in the mainstream media have already decided that acquiescence is their way of self-preservation not only is naive but dangerousTara Setmayer, the Seneca Project
The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, visited Mar-a-Lago in November despite previously eviscerating his fascist rhetoric. Scarborough defended the meeting, arguing that any journalist would take an opportunity to meet the president-elect but he and Brzezinski were being penalised for being “transparent” about it.
Critics, however, were not persuaded. Schmidt said: “If you go down there and you make an expression, ‘I did this for you’, will you come out of the meeting and either confirm that he is Hitler or we were off on that and we don’t have to worry? It seems like the purpose of the meeting was to make some type of deal with Hitler.”
This week Trump sued a pollster and a newspaper over survey results published days before the US election showing him behind in Iowa – a state he ultimately won by a landslide. He has also filed a $10bn lawsuit against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. There are concerns that his demonstrated willingness to punish his critics could have a chilling effect.
Setmayer, who now runs the Seneca Project political action committee, commented: “The way some in the mainstream media have already decided that acquiescence is their way of self-preservation not only is naive but dangerous because without that we don’t have an informed citizenry. It’s supposed to be without fear or favor and media is acting out of fear. And by way of acting out of fear, they are giving Trump the favor that he wants.”
Observers warn that acceptance of Trump’s behavior will erode democratic norms and emboldens him to pursue an authoritarian agenda and silence dissent. Some have drawn comparisons with Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary with its combination of overt censorship, loyal state media and tamed private media.
Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who begins his pamphlet “On Tyranny” with the “Do not obey in advance”, said: “One worries that in the US regime the censorship part is going to be taken over by people who are a million times richer than you suing you. The threat of being sued by a Trump or a Musk or whatever - a person who already controls the government and the economy - means every ‘little person’ has to be worried.”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk in Brownsville, Texas, on 19 November. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Pro-Trump networks such as Fox News and Newsmax, while not state controlled, will be “state proximate”, Snyder added. “But the thing which is closest is the private media which tries to come to some kind of agreement. Putting the moral part aside, if you’re coming to some kind of agreement, conceding in advance is maybe not the best negotiating strategy.”
Anyone expecting to find serious guardrails in Washington might be disappointed. Republicans in Congress have been largely pliant, with signs of easing opposition towards controversial cabinet picks such as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, his vaccine-sceptic choice for health secretary.
Some Democrats, too, have signaled a willingness to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s cost-cutting “department of government efficiency”. Asked how she would respond to Trump’s plans for mass deportations, the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, replied: “Someone breaks the law, I’ll be the first one to call up Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and say, ‘Get them out of here.’”
Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, has also embraced some Trump policies and not ruled out running as a Republican in future. Even Joe Biden has backed off from his previous warnings that Trump is a danger to democracy – apparently seeking the graceful transition that his predecessor denied him.
Meanwhile, since the election, a parade of world leaders have made their way to Mar-a-Lago. They range from rightwing ally Orbán to Canada’s Justin Trudeau, facing Trump’s threats of huge new tariffs which have plunged his own domestic politics into turmoil. Longtime opponents of Trump are worried about what the mass capitulation portends.
Bill Kristol, director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said: One reason a lot of us were so hostile to Trump is we thought he would do this kind of thing. He’s not a theoretical authoritarian or ideological dictator, though he has elements of that, but he’s like a cunning bully and mob boss and the system can only resist for so long.
“The guardrails are good but they they need people to uphold them. This is true of the political guardrails – Congress, the political parties, the courts – but it’s also true of the broader societal guardrails: the private sector, the media, and there I would say I’m struck by the apparent speed of the capitulation.”
For all Trump’s claims of an overwhelming majority, more than 48% of the electorate voted for Harris but some in “the resistance” appear to have lost the will to fight.
Kristol warned: “It won’t have the kind of friendly corporate encouragement that it had in the first term. People will have to think more like dissidents and less like we’re the natural majority and Trump just happened to win a fluke election, which was the attitude in 2017. It will be challenging.”
