Trump and the Tech Industrial Complex
What’s happening in America right now is about more than politics and economics. It’s about personal grievances and retribution. And I’m not just talking about Donald Trump.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961
“We are seeing the beginning of a new constellation of power.” Franklin Foer on NPR Forum, January 20, 2025 ¹
It’s no surprise that corporate leaders favor Donald Trump. He comes from the business world and vocally spews disdain for government. Even if his vitriol exceeds the frustration of a typical Capitalist, he provides a channel for their pent up grievances.
But what’s unsettling is the recent alliance a particular group of very powerful executives have publicly displayed for the newly-elected President. Unsettling because these men possess great economic and technical power, in addition to being some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Tech Bros Go MAGA
Capitalists favoring a pro-business Republican is not unexpected. But the excessive amount of wealth contributed by these tech titans to Trump’s campaign and the expectation of receiving unrestrained power in exchange should sound the alarm.
Their vocal and financial allegiance to Trump has been described as opportunistic, advantageous, kowtowing, abasement… but I think there is something deeper and more personal at play here for these guys.
Peas of a Pod
If I were to play the video tape of their teen years, I am certain I would discover Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were marginalized and probably bullied. (You can throw Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio into this group.)
You don’t have to be a shrink to see their world view is informed by resentment and, at their worse, retribution.
Mark Zuckerberg was a wimp. By all accounts, a nerd without social connections or pedigree at Harvard. By some accounts, a person who stole an idea that became Facebook, which eventually became Meta. (Although you have to give him credit that even if he took and ran with a nascent idea, he clearly built it into something he, and he alone, saw as The New Media. Maybe he didn’t see the full picture, but he is bright enough to perceive what social media could become, and he was able to see it in real time.)
However, he is clearly a duplicitous, amoral weasel who has little conscience for how he is personally affecting society, especially the digital generation. In this, he is justified by his deep resentment over his inability to garner the respect that has eluded him his entire life.
This explains his new physique, recent affinity for Jiu Jitsu, and his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, vocalizing a male backlash to decades of liberal agenda that’s feminized society and imposed Woke initiatives which cost money and, more importantly, clipped the autonomy of corporate leaders with minimum wages, DEI programs and hybrid work schedules.
This shackling of corporate power has rankled executives and we are now seeing their violent opposition being channelled in their robust support of Donald Trump’s pro-business, laissez-faire agenda.
Coincidentally, an agenda that is largely born out of the same grievances as the tech titans, namely being disrespected and marginalized.
Flashback to New York City in the 70s and you’ll find a real estate developer, wet behind the ears, propped up by daddy’s money, wanting to gentrify his income property by refusing to rent to minorities so he could cast the property as upscale and charge higher rent — which, by the way, was at a time that Queens saw a huge influx of immigrants from Russia, most notably in Brighton Beach.²
Trump’s agenda was challenged by the ACLU, which prompted his relationship with the ruthless Roy Cohen which, as presciently told by former Village Voice reporter William Barrett, shaped the young businessman into the reckless, dishonest, vindictive person we know today.
According to Barrett, all the denial, attacks, lies, fabrications, falsehoods, slander and venomous speech was learned at the knee of Cohen. It’s also been Trump’s business model, which has led to an alchemy of success and failure, punctuated by innumerable law suits and endless litigation, wrapped in a public veneer of unparalleled success and wealth.
But, to anyone who lived in New York during Trump’s pre-Mar Lago days, he was a joke. Everyone knew he was a charlatan — a con man who relentlessly promoted himself as a dealmaker extraordinaire and a man wealthy beyond measure. But for all his bluster and gaudy display of wealth, he was ridiculed and dismissed.
Again, you do not need a PhD in psychology to see that what Trump wanted more than anything in the world was validation. Specifically, he wanted to be accepted into the New York elite; a peer of the Rockefellers, Astors, Paleys and Radziwills.
But he never became more than a pretender. Even Trump’s purchase of The Plaza failed to become the diadem of the crown he hoped to achieve, despite his ostentatious renovation which betrayed his love of all things shiny and gold.
In this, you can see his bond with Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk, who have each seen the admiration and respect they so desperately seek elude them. But more importantly, it explains the bond Trump has with Vladimir Putin — a man whose deep grievance with the West has driven the world to the brink of World War III.
The Donald and The Dictator
In the early 17th Century, Russia was a rising power, who struggled to find acceptance with Europe’s ruling elite. They were looked down upon as uncultured, and openly mocked for their attempts to be more European. In simple terms, Russia was marginalized and bullied by Europe. Even intermarriage failed to elevate them to European royalty. This grievance fuels Peter The Great’s mother orchestration of his ascent and instill in him a vision for an empire that would rival the kingdoms of Europe. Peter hired military instructors from France and Poland to modernize Russia’s army… he employed master shipbuilders from Holland to create a state-of-the-art navy… and commissioned leading architects from Italy to build a major seaport out of a swamp.³
This Russian Empire, that was born out of striving and resentment, reveals Putin’s sense of humiliation at the break up of the USSR in 1991. Having to watch geographic regions that were once part of a great world power break away and become independent — and in some cases, become thriving economies on their own — became a root of bitterness that has poisoned him in the decades since. Especially as many of those regions became part of NATO, an alliance of the West, who never accepted Russia as its peer.
Putin’s grievance is so parallel to Trump it’s uncanny — harboring a resentment for a validation that has always eluded him. As it is with Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk. It even illumines how Tim Cooke has become an acolyte of Trump, being forever trapped in the shadow of Steven Jobs, to whom he will never measure up.
I didn’t see Satya Nadella of Microsoft at the Inauguration, but Sundar Pichai of Google was there. And you can bet their investment in AI means they’re in the Band of Tech Bros sucking up to Trump. As is Shou Zi Chew of Tiktok, publicly display his backing for obvious reasons.
These guys are part of the Tech Industrial Complex, and in Trump they see a transactional leader who will grease the skids for wherever they want technology to go.
Zuckerberg has already jettisoned fact-checking on Facebook. The stakes for AI are high as the world tries to guard against our worse fears. Data is becoming the new utility, making those with the capacity to compute — like Microsoft and AWS — a potentially powerful monopoly.
President Musk and Mr. Trump
This Oligarchy taking shape before our very eyes means Donald Trump is not the only person running the show. Especially if he’s giving some of this cabal power to reshape government agencies that oversee business contracts and ethics.
Even before Trump was sworn in, Elon Musk tweeted in on the Congressional caucus for the budget. He did this in advance of Trump, who is an obsessive user of social media. And when Trump was on the phone with Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, Elon was there.
That’s not necessarily bad. But it is unsettling.
If a Tech Titan — one who has significant partnerships and contracts with the U.S. Government — has a seat at the table of diplomacy, how many ways could that cross the lines of business ethics and national security?
Granted, Trump relishes disruption of government norms. Which, in theory, is a healthy thing. But disruption that’s fueled by grievance and retribution is not. It’s damaging and potentially detrimental to Democracy.
Unchecked power was the number one issue for the Constitutional Congress. Getting the proper balance of State vs Federal rights was their top priority, closely followed by slavery.⁴
But in all their foresight, the founders never imagined the technology we know today. They could’ve hardly conceived of a public square accessible on a thing you hold in your hand that a President would wield to spew lies and conspiracy theories so he could sway public opinion to his dystopian views. They certainly had no mental capacity for digital currency that is trafficked on a hidden blockchain which would garner such a President $60 billion dollars in a matter of days without any accountability where that money came from and what expectations come with it.
But this is where we find ourselves: a President without accountability in bed with the most powerful Capitalists in the world. (Teddy Roosevelt is turning in his grave.)
This is about as far way as you can get from our first President, George Washington, who refused to hold any more power than the consent that those he governed gave him.
“America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering… Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.” Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration
FOOTNOTES
¹ For context, listen to Foer’s response to a caller’s comment about the acquiescence of tech moguls to Trump’s MAGA agenda at 22:34 of NPR’s Forum.
² From his first real estate venture during a wave of Russian immigration, to his hosting the Miss Universe pageant and building hotels in Moscow, to his admiration for Putin, to Russia meddling in the 2016 election, the affiliation Trump has with Russia for half a century should cause curious concern about what deals have been struck in private… and who holds the leverage. Now that Trump has $60B worth of his own crypto currency, there’s no way of knowing who’s depositing or withdrawing that money on blockchain.
³ A great history of Russia as it evolved from a geographic backwater to an empire can be found in Robert Massie’s Peter The Great. Spoiler alert: Even though the book is a biography of Peter Romanov, the story of Charles XII of Sweden steals the show, who, as a teen, inherited his father’s crown only to fend off an alliance orchestrated by Peter’s relative Frederick of Denmark, which included Peter and Augustus of Saxony, resulting in Charles’ conquest of Denmark and most of Eastern Europe to within 50 miles of Moscow.
⁴ If you want to read the actual minutes of the Constitutional Congress, download a PDF of The History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States, published by George Bancroft in 1820. In it, you witness a blow-by-blow account of the issues and debate, as well as transcriptions of actual dialogue between the Founding Fathers. In reading, you will see abolition of slavery was favored by the majority, but in the eleventh hour removed from the draft in order to get South Carolina and Georgia on board. Their economies, which depended on slave labor, were essential for the fledgling Union. You will also the seeds of discrimination that continue to grow today in conservative rhetoric and the gerrymandering of state electoral maps. You can also see that the 2nd Amendment was written as a State right, in the larger context of giving States a degree of self-determination should the Federal government overreach. “The right to bear arms” nullified previous law that made possession of forearms treason against the British Crown. Not a personal right to carry a gun… let alone an AK-15.
