Capitalists Line Up to Lick Trump’s Boots, Prove They Don’t Understand America

The wave of capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg capitulating in the wake of Trump’s election is instructive for many reasons. Some point to it as proof of their fundamental evil nature, as it is just another example one can find throughout history of capitalists enthusiastically supporting fascists, but I think that historical dynamic is motivated by economics more than morality. The United States has always liked overthrowing democracies within shooting range of the Monroe Doctrine and replacing them with autocracies because they are easier to control, and capitalists like fascism more than democracy for that same reason. Capitalism is not an immoral system, but an amoral one, which enables immoral actors to be their worst selves, and I think what we are seeing is this dynamic unfolding across what has become a fundamentally short-sighted economy driven by the greed of the C-suite.

Which brings me to Mark Zuckerberg, arguably the most detestable of the Silicon Valley slumlords. Elon Musk gets the bulk of attention for good reason, but there’s no evidence to suggest that Mark Zuckerberg’s feudal view of society is any different, and say what you want about Musk, but at least his companies aren’t just vast collections of other people’s ideas. Aside from buying an election, Elon’s biggest impact on the world to date is taking over a company that built a really great electric battery that sometimes explodes, while Zuckerberg’s legacy is stealing Harvard students’ personal information so he could use it to build someone else’s idea that unleashed a tsunami of harmful lies on the planet which helped elect Trump and cause a genocide in Myanmar.

As Dave Levitan so eloquently detailed for Splinter today, Mark Zuckerberg announced tweaks to the flaming pile of trash that defines him as one of the worst humans of the 21st century. This is a major change for Facebook, as it is shifting from underpaid and overworked content moderators to community notes like his good sparring buddy Elon has. There is no mystery as to why Zuckerberg is making this fundamental alteration to his platform, as he said that the election “feels like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” While free speech on the internet is synonymous with bullshit and this pivot back towards politics will undoubtedly make Facebook more damaging to society, at the very least, it should be funny to watch Zuck and Musk pretend to be tough guys towards each other as they fight for the same audience overflowing with the most fragile male egos on the planet.

But Zuckerberg isn’t the only one making changes to company policy in direct response to Trump’s victory. McDonald’s recently joined Walmart, John Deere, Harley-Davidson and others who have rolled back their diversity goals after the election. JPMorgan Chase just became the final Wall Street bank to leave the Net Zero Banking alliance, as the “rational market” decided that being able to invest in oil companies is a better future for the world than a habitable planet. Every Luigi-fearing CEO is enthusiastically getting on their knees to slather their tongue all over Trump’s boot right now. While this servility to power is no-doubt driven by their desire to get in the good graces of a litigious autocrat, these companies still have to sell their products in a market that’s broader than our politics, and their read on it stands in defiance to all available evidence as to how this last election actually unfolded.

What Actually Happened in 2024

Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton beat him by in 2016, and the Republicans are about to manage the smallest House majority in a century, yet capitalists are treating this election like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 near-shutout of Walter Mondale. While some would ascribe evil to these capitalists’ motivations, and for some like Zuck and Elon, evil is objectively one of their core passions in life, I think that’s too narrow a reading of the situation. These companies that are rolling back diversity initiatives enacted them in the first place after the George Floyd protests. Were they evil then?

I really don’t think that what we’re dealing with here is more than a bunch of C-suite dullards who, when it comes to politics, don’t know shit about fuck, and just follow whatever they see on TV news, which studies have proven is literal brain poison. Their politics have yet to prove themselves to be more than just surface-level observations, which is where TV news’s sweet spot resides. Combine this with the fact that as CEO compensation has become more stock-based, companies have prioritized next quarter’s returns over those five years from now. There is simply no serious long-term planning in our economy anymore. It has devolved into a constant cash grab as everyone in major corporate power assumes that the music will never stop, and they will always be able to paper over the holes their greed creates with more money. Their herky-jerky reactions to America’s herky-jerky presidential elections simply mirror this fundamental short-term worldview that has become rooted in markets primarily concerned with tomorrow’s stock price.

Former Political Director of the AFL-CIO and current Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Michael Podhorzer, wrote the best analysis of what actually happened in the presidential election that everyone should read. American media is entirely dependent on horse race narratives, and that means that our view of politics tends to narrow towards the next and the last elections. Each one takes on its own individual importance and narrative, obscuring the larger picture that all of them paint together.

As Podhorzer writes, “Consider that only once before in American history have three consecutive presidential elections seen the White House change partisan hands, and that nine out of the last ten midterm or presidential elections have been ‘change elections,’ in the sense that either the presidency, the House, or the Senate changed partisan hands,⁴ which is completely unprecedented… This election wasn’t just a vote of no confidence in Democrats; it was yet another vote of no confidence in our entire political system.”

America didn’t really shift right. Nearly every demographic broke harder for Trump than they did in 2020, but the dirty secret of how demographic vote share in elections is typically presented is that the percentages don’t actually tell you anything about absolute changes in vote totals. As Podhorzer notes, “Trump won the same percentage of the eligible population as he did four years ago (32%).” There was a genuine shift right with certain blocs like Latino voters, but a big part of these demographic shifts is rooted in the fact that in deep-blue areas, a lot of traditional Democratic constituencies did not vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

The story of this election was a collapse in support for the Democratic Party, as Kamala Harris’s share of eligible voters fell 3.5 percent from Joe Biden’s figure in 2020. It would be far more accurate to say the Democratic Party lost this election than Trump won it. MAGA has had three very similar elections now all detailing a very clear ceiling of around a third of eligible voters, and the only dramatic changes to our politics have taken place outside of the GOP’s safe space for maniacs.

More people don’t vote or vote third party or vote Democrat than voted for Trump. They eat hamburgers and have bank accounts and use the internet too, yet these short-sighted companies are letting politics completely erase them from their current political calculus that seems to assume that they don’t matter, and Trump will be a dictator who protects their profits (despite all available evidence pointing towards his tariffs doing the opposite). What an efficient and rational market!