22 hours ago

Will flattery get you everywhere with Donald Trump? Billionaires are determined to find out | Arwa Mahdawi

Reader, I was wrong. So terribly wrong. It pains me to admit this but, back in the distant past (last year), I wrote some very nasty things about Donald Trump and his family. Now that I am older and wiser I realise how misguided this was. So let me set the record straight: the incoming president is an exceptionally handsome man with an incredibly high IQ. We are all blessed that this very stable genius has taken time out of his busy golfing schedule to lead the free world to prosperity.

What do you reckon … was I sycophantic enough or do I need to lay the flattery on even thicker? I’m asking because, as you’ve no doubt noticed, genuflecting to the uber-transactional Trump is ramping up now that inauguration day is approaching. Business leaders are breaking records with the amount of money they’re dumping into Trump’s inaugural fund. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social in December.

Mark Zuckerberg certainly does. Not only has he praised the incoming president as “badass”, he’s rejigged Meta’s leadership to be more Trump-friendly. Trump ally Dana White has been appointed to Meta’s board. Meanwhile Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister, is leaving his role (with millions in his pocket) as Meta’s president of global affairs. Joel Kaplan, the most prominent conservative voice at the company – who is known for his support of Brett Kavanaugh when he faced assault claims – is taking Clegg’s place. Meta is also removing fact-checkers and getting rid of restrictions on what people can say about topics such as immigration and gender. So if Trump wants to continue to spread lies about immigrants eating cats in Ohio, I guess it’s all good with Meta.

Dana White with Donald Trump in November.

Jeff Bezos is giving Zuck a run for his money in the obsequiousness Olympics. At the Bezos-owned Washington Post, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes recently resigned in response to the newspaper refusing to publish a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos, along with other titans of industry, kneeling before Trump. While the Post’s opinions editor said the decision to axe the cartoon was solely driven by the fact that they’d already published a column on the same topic, Telnaes seemed to think otherwise. In a substack post she called the decision “dangerous for a free press.” Last year the Post also made headlines after a decision to prevent its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

It’s not just Trump getting buttered up by Bezos. The streaming division of Bezos’s other baby, Amazon, announced on Sunday that it is releasing an “unprecedented behind-the-scenes” documentary about Melania Trump. Brett Ratner is directing – it’s the filmmaker’s first major project after being accused of sexual misconduct by at least six women in 2017. It’s not clear whether the Trump family is being paid to participate in the film; the general consensus, however, seems to be that this is not so much a documentary as a puff piece. Melania is known for being extremely private, after all, so one imagines she wouldn’t allow anyone behind the scenes unless it was very much on her terms.

What other get-on-Trump’s-good-side projects has Amazon got in the pipeline, one wonders? Might Ivanka Trump do a Duchess of Sussex, and create her own lifestyle show? Or perhaps Tiffany Trump (whose father-in-law is her dad’s new Middle East adviser) can finally further her dreams of being a pop star. Who knows. One thing that does seem alarmingly clear, as economic elites jostle to get in Trump’s good books, is that the billionaire takeover of the US is complete. We are very much living in an age of oligarchy.

Of course, this isn’t (all) Trump’s doing: his second term is the symptom of a broken system, not its cause. The US has been for sale to the highest bidder for a very long time. Power has been consolidating into an ever-smaller set of hands for decades – a process catalysed by Citizens United: the 2010 supreme court decision that paved the way for almost unlimited amounts of money in politics.

What’s different now, however, is how shamelessly transactional Trump is. If there’s a silver lining to the current moment perhaps it’s the transparency of it all. The US has long thought itself exceptional; a beacon of democracy completely incomparable to the likes of oligarchic Russia. Trump’s crass modus operandi makes this illusion of American exceptionalism harder to maintain. That’s a good thing: you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. And it’s time to acknowledge that democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. It’s been dying for years now, in plain sight.