Breaking with at least a decade of company policy, Meta has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s second inaugural fund, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The company didn’t contribute to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, and more to the point it didn’t contribute to Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. But the move comes amid Meta CEO and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to court favor with Trump going into his second term.
Trump and Zuckerberg have previously been on more contentious terms. Facebook restricted the reach of a New York Post report on Hunter Biden in the weeks before the 2020 election, and Meta banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram in early 2021 after he incited the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the capitol in order to overturn the election and continued to spread the lie that he won that election.
As recently as October however, Trump said his relationship with Zuckerberg is “much better,” in part because Trump believed Zuckerberg was “staying out of the election.”
But just 3 months ago, Trump was openly threatening to send Zuckerberg to prison for life after Zuckerberg said he regrets that the company cooperated with the Biden administration’s efforts to combat COVID disinformation. I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time.
Since the election, Zuckerberg has cozied up to Trump rather aggressively, meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago in November. After the meeting, Trump adviser Stephen Miller said that Zuckerberg “made clear that he wants to support the national renewal of America under Trump’s leadership.”
