Team Trump Says Mark Zuckerberg Has ‘More Ass-Kissing’ to Do
At the dawn of a second Donald Trump era, Mark Zuckerberg has been busy sucking up to a president who last year threatened him with life in prison.
The Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder reportedly promised the administration he won’t stand in the way of Trump’s immigration crackdowns, which the tech billionaire previously opposed. His company announced it’s ending its fact-checking program, removed restrictions on hate speech, and shoved a million bucks into Trump’s inaugural coffers. Meta is also ending its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
It’s still not enough — not nearly enough — for much of the Trumpworld elite.
“There is a lot more ass-kissing that needs to be done,” says a senior Trump administration official. “He just needs to prove himself. It’s a good start, but he can’t just snap his fingers and make the past not happen.”
The lengths to which Zuckerberg has been willing to go to appease Team Trump is part of a broader effort by the country’s tech, corporate, and billionaire elites to get in good with Trump now, no matter how much his swelling authoritarianism and xenophobia may have unnerved them in the past. And the somewhat dissatisfied reception Zuckerberg has so far received from his new MAGA overlords underscores just how much Trump and his far-right lieutenants wish to bend their former and current enemies to their will.
According to three people familiar with the matter, various members of Donald Trump’s White House and the newly inaugurated president’s inner orbit don’t buy Zuckerberg’s right-wing conversion as entirely genuine, and view it as at least partly motivated by self-interest — an effort to inoculate himself and his business to the wrath of the Trump administration.
To these sources — one of whom says they’ve spoken to Trump very recently about Zuckerberg’s blatant attempts at currying favor with the new regime — the Meta CEO has a long road to travel before earning the full confidence of the Trump White House, given that the Republican president and some of his top advisers have long fumed over Zuckerberg’s track record on immigration politics, his company’s past efforts to fact check right-wing disinformation, and Big Tech’s displays of cultural liberalism.
It was the billionaire’s funding of 2020 election infrastructure that prompted the prison threat from Trump. In a coffee-table book published in September, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg had steered Facebook against him and schemed “to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.”
Trump continued: “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
During Trump’s first term in office, Stephen Miller — an anti-immigration zealot who’s been a top Trump policy adviser for roughly a decade — annoyed several of his colleagues by complaining so frequently about Zuckerberg and his support for Obama-era immigration reform during White House meetings and conversations, a former Trump administration official says.
Times have changed, and Zuckerberg is now bending the knee. He met with Miller at Mar-a-Lago late last year, and pledged not to obstruct the president’s right-wing agenda, according to The New York Times.
Earlier this month, Trump praised Facebook after it said it was ending its fact-checking program. “Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way — Meta, Facebook,” he said. When a reporter asked Trump whether he views Meta’s policy change as a response to his past threats against Zuckerberg, Trump replied, “Yeah, probably.”
His White House, another current Trump administration official says, will be “keeping an eye on how [Zuckerberg] follows through,” in the coming months and years, on items such as helping steer Silicon Valley toward clampdowns on diversity programs and away from pro-immigration politics.
“He doesn’t want to get charged with all the evidence and truth he covered up,” says MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell, who has pushed conspiracy theories about Zuckerberg while pelting him with harsh words for years. “SuckABuck,” as Lindell derisively calls Zuckerberg, “also has hurt many people’s businesses by taking away their followers and shadow banning them!” the pillow mogul adds. “He should allow a full investigation into his fact checkers if he wasn’t involved! He should help get rid of electronic voting machines in our country like 132 other countries that have banned them.”
Some Fox News hosts have also publicly questioned Zuckerberg’s shift to the right.
After Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to complain about the Biden administration’s censorship demands — and grouse about how corporate America is “culturally neutered” and our society has been “emasculated” — the hosts of Fox and Friends, a show Trump regularly watches, gleefully skewered the world’s third-richest man.
Co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy called Zuckerberg “weak” and “a weasel” for acceding to liberal censorship requests, and said he was only admitting it “now that all the tide has turned.” Her co-host Charles Hurt called Zuckerberg “a little baby,” while host Will Cain agreed that Zuckerberg is “weak” and “now bending to the new direction of the wind.”
Trump’s aides and supporters might not be buying Zuckerberg’s rightward drift, but it has infuriated some of Zuckerberg’s allies.
Mark Lemley, a lawyer who was representing Meta in its generative AI copyright dispute, announced he “fired Meta as a client,” based on “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.”
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