Journalists Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker on Trump and the Tech Oligarchs

New Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, authors of a recent article called “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” join host Whitney Terrell to talk about tech oligarchs’ influence over President Trump’s administration. They discuss the significance of prominent billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos attending Trump’s inauguration as visible supporters, how these tech leaders have changed their opinion of Trump over time, and the regulatory and legal benefits they may gain from their close association with the new administration. They also discuss Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the fallout from that group’s efforts to access Treasury data and dismantle USAID.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: On January 20, which seems like a very long time ago now, you wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” which is how we originally got in touch with you, and wanted to have you on the show. What made you decide that this was the territory you wanted to focus on for some of your first work at The Atlantic?

Ashley Parker: Well, we had literally just started—both of us—at The Atlantic the week before Trump’s inauguration, and Michael in particular was very stressed about getting points on the board and writing a story. It’s true. So we were both trying to figure out what’s the thing we can say about the inauguration that feels interesting and different, and we realized that all of these tech bros coming to Washington, and the little bits of reporting we were picking up of where they were going to be seated during the inauguration, who had invited them—Trump himself— what sort of parties they were hosting, just felt new and different and like we could tell our readers not just some new reporting, but the beginnings of a story that we believe is going to be pretty influential, at least in these early months of Trump’s second time back in the White House.

Michael Sherer: Yeah, I would just add that in Trump’s first term, when he came to office, he had very few friends. There were very few people in Congress who really wanted to tolerate him. Even among Republicans, there were not many major donors. Captains of industry were also trying to keep him at arm’s length. And I think the tech leaders being at the inauguration was a symbol of one of the biggest shifts that we’ve had eight years later, when he’s come back. The opposition that grieved him before has basically gone away, in part because of the popular vote, in part because he clearly knows better what he’s doing this time around, has sharper plans, in part because he has said retribution is on the menu, and that’s what he’s after. There’s a lot of kissing of the ring going on, and having those people in some cases in front of the cabinet, standing on the stage there at the inauguration, right behind the family, was a showman’s move. He was showing that the most powerful, the wealthiest—I mean, he always has graded people by wealth—so some of the wealthiest people in the world are on my side this time. 

WT: Well, speaking of that change, you write in the article about the contrast between the way that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, greeted Trump’s presidency in 2017 and the way he reacted today. Could you talk about that, and do you have any theories as to why he’s changed so completely?

MS: Yeah, so if you listen to him, he says it’s been a personal evolution, that he didn’t think hard enough about how to manage political debate online before, that he feels the Biden administration Democrats put too much pressure on him during that term and before the 2020 election, to moderate posts. He’s also undergone a personal journey. I mean, a few weeks before the inauguration, he goes on Joe Rogan and talks about the value of masculine energy in the boardroom and how he’s been learning about himself through mixed martial arts fighting, you know, he’s done a lot of things. He obviously changed the way they’re moderating content. One of the first meetings he had with Trump—and he went down to Mar-a-Lago multiple times—you know, one of the pieces of this is that—

WT: You wrote a January 29 article on Meta’s settlement with Trump.

MS: Right. So, I mean, that was just another kissing of the ring.

Just to give your listeners some backstory here, after the January 6 riots in 2021 Trump sued then-Facebook, YouTube and then-Twitter, saying that they had violated the First Amendment by enforcing their own policies to kick him off their services. And it was a very bizarre lawsuit, because the First Amendment restricts what the government does, it does not restrict what private business does. You don’t have a First Amendment right to say whatever you want in the Atlantic, the Atlantic gets to decide what is written in the Atlantic. But his argument was that there had been pressure from government officials that had forced this change to happen. It was a weird argument, in part because he was the government at the time, right, he was president of the United States at the time that this all happened, and in the course of the lawsuits that followed, they really couldn’t come up with any evidence that this had happened, that these changes had been made because of government pressure. They had some quotes from lawmakers who had said, I think it should happen, we’ll look at regulation of big tech companies, but there was no direct instruction. 

And so, broadly, the legal community did not think these lawsuits had any merit to them, but after the election, Zuckerberg goes down to Mar-a-Lago, they have their meeting, and pretty soon he’s back with lawyers negotiating a settlement. That settlement has since come out, which I wrote about, for $25 million. Twitter, now X, now owned by Elon Musk, top donor and advisor to the president, announced that it was seeking a settlement. They both have put Google in a very difficult position now, because Google has not engaged in any of this so far, but the appellate court ruling that would have gotten Google off the hook, many people expected, has now been put off because X is settling. So there’s all these ways in which Trump was immediately exerting his power over these executives, and these executives were allowing him to do it. They weren’t fighting. They have bigger fish to fry at this point.

AP: I’m just going to add, when Michael was talking about Mark Zuckerberg undergoing this personal evolution, talking about the importance of a masculine energy, Michael and I were just recently out for drinks with a Trump confidante who also knows some of these tech folks, and was saying there was something about that moment in Butler, Pennsylvania when the attempted assassination, and obviously that iconic photo where he is lifted back up by Secret Service and waves his fist in the air and mouths ‘fight, fight, fight,’ that this person said tapped into something almost animalistic in these tech executives, a certain macho-ness. They just instantly understood. I mean, Elon has basically said that was one of the reasons he decided to come over and actually endorse Trump and get engaged. Jeff Bezos calls Trump immediately afterwards. And so for a lot of these guys we would call the tech bros, there was something about that moment that drew them more closely to Trump.

MS: They also each have very complicated regulatory problems with the federal government right now.

WT: We’re gonna get to that. I want to talk about Bezos, though—the way that he’s changed too, you know? Both of you worked for The Post. He bought The Post in 2013. The paper adopted the slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in 2017, which seemed to many people, including me, to be aimed at the incoming Trump administration, but he famously killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. And now here he is. Bezos is visiting Mar-a-Lago also and funding and attending Trump’s inauguration. Same question, how did this happen? Is it just that he saw a picture and thought Trump was a stud?

AP: It was that animalistic.

WT: It’s so hilarious. I don’t know, that’s ridiculous.

AP: I mean one misconception, I think a little bit, about the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan—I always go back to something that Marty Baron, our Executive Editor in Chief at that moment, said that went along with it, which is, “we’re not at war, we’re at work,”and so “Democracy Dies in Darkness” felt like doing what newspapers do, what The Washington Post does so well, which is to hold power to account, and we certainly did that. We held Donald Trump to account in his first term, but we also did that with Joe Biden and the Kamala Harris campaign, so I understand why you might have interpreted it as very specifically geared towards Donald Trump, but that was a broader thing that The Washington Post always does and continues to do.

I think the challenge with someone like Jeff Bezos pulling the Kamala Harris endorsement, and he can speak for himself, he wrote an explanation that people can choose to believe or not as to why he did it, and coming to the inauguration and basically sitting on Trump’s lap, the challenge there is that you have great journalists at The Washington Post and great editors. And to be clear, it would be problematic had Bezos sat on Barack Obama’s lap, right? It’s not a Trump thing. It’s an uncomfortable thing with an owner of a newspaper, but that’s an owner’s prerogative. And so what I will say is, for the eight years I worked at the Post where I covered all four years of the Trump presidency, the first two years with the Biden administration, and then I moved over and covered this most recent campaign, Jeff Bezos never once meddled in our copy. He never once touched the journalism. He didn’t, to my knowledge, ask an editor or anyone to touch it. If that had happened, you would know, everyone would know, there would be mass resignations, and there would have been. And there were moments, especially in the first Trump term, where we were writing stories about Trump that made Trump unhappy, and he was trying to take it out on Amazon and on Jeff Bezos,and we never heard a single word. 

And so again, what’s tricky is, when Bezos shows up at the inauguration, or goes down to Mar-a-Lago, or holds an endorsement, it gives people, understandably, a reason to superimpose their worst fears and their worst conspiracies on what’s going on. But the truth is, he has not meddled, and I think you would know if and when he does. 

MS: Yeah, I would just add that I think it’s important for your listeners to understand how newspapers work, and that there is an editorial page and there are op-ed contributors and opinion writers. They answer up to the publisher through their own chain of command. The reporters—we were both reporters there for the first Trump term and the Biden term—we report up to our own editor, who eventually reports to the publisher, but they’re entirely separate tracks, and there’s a wall between them. And the tradition is, in newspapers, that an owner can influence the editorials, that the owner can weigh in on what kind of opinion journalists he wants to hire or she wants to hire, and that is their prerogative. 

And so, I speak personally, I wasn’t as upset as many are, really at all, unlike many of the readers of The Washington Post, when he pulled the endorsement. I didn’t really care. It didn’t affect my work. It didn’t affect what I was doing. It was never asked of me.

Now, the underlying question of why Bezos has made this shift, I think, we just have to point to the obvious things. He has said publicly that the obvious conflicts he has, because his companies are before the government every single day somewhere, meeting with a government official, are really complicated for him as a newspaper owner, and he admits that outright.He’s invested enormous amounts of his own money into a rocket ship company that needs federal funding, and President Trump, in the first term, made very clear that he would punish Amazon, or attempt to punish Amazon, because of what he saw as the wrongs of his newspaper. And so I think it’s totally reasonable to believe that Bezos came into this thinking he was in a vulnerable position. Elon Musk, the guy who runs the other rocket company that’s actually, right now, more successful than Bezos’ rocket company, is the top donor of the president, a personal advisor to the president. [Bezos is] on the outside, and I don’t know why he pulled that endorsement, but those are all facts that give you context of his decision to pull that endorsement.

AP: To answer your question of what happened to The Post, which I think was the broad question, the last thing I would say is it’s The Washington Post. There’s great editors, there’s great reporters, they’re doing great journalism. Even in the weeks since we’ve left for The Atlantic, they’ve had stories, great scoops we wish we had had. And I think the answer to that question really comes down to the current publisher, Will Lewis, and if he is able to articulate a business plan and stop The Post from hemorrhaging money and win back the trust and respect from the newsroom which he has almost entirely lost.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara.

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Ashley Parker & Michael Scherer

The Tech Oligarchy Arrives |The Atlantic |January 20, 2025 • Trump Advisers Stopped Musk From Hiring a Noncitizen at DOGE |The Atlantic |February 4, 2025 • Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center |The Atlantic | February 7, 2025 • Trump’s Conquest of the Kennedy Center Is Accelerating |The Atlantic | February 8,  2025

Ashley Parker

The Memo That Shocked the White House |The Atlantic | January 29, 2025

Michael Scherer

Why Meta Is Paying $25 Million to Settle a Trump Lawsuit |The Atlantic | January 29, 2025

Others:

DOGE task force gains access to U.S. Treasury Department data, payment systems |CBS News |February 3, 2025 • Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency |The Guardian |February 5, 2025 • Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity – The White House |The White House |January 21, 2025 • Meta Goes Full MAGA as it Kills Off DEI Programs |Daily Beast|January 10, 2025 • The Tech Oligarchy Arrives |The Atlantic |January 20, 2025 • Trump, a populist president, is flanked by tech billionaires at his inauguration | AP News | January 20, 2025 • Zuckerberg Turns Facebook Full MAGA and Smears California Staff |Yahoo! News |January 7, 2025