These billionaires transferred millions from their personal accounts to Trump's "inauguration fund," a kind of presidential tip jar that Trump rattled under the noses of any convenient industry leaders hoping for preferential treatment from his regime. It paid off handsomely.

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Just days before the inauguration, Trump flew to Davos where he told the world's leaders - especially in the EU - that he would not tolerate attempts to regulate US Big Tech companies, such as the EU's groundbreaking Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

gizmodo.com/trump-returns-big-…

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Trump Returns Big Tech's Ass Kissing at Davos

As Trump heads back to the White House, he's putting the rest of the world on notice.

^{Lucas Ropek (Gizmodo)}

There's been a lot of talk about how disillusioned liberals - especially those in Silicon Valley - are with Big Tech's heel turn, but what about the Trumpist factions that hate Big Tech?

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Plenty of people in the Trump base profess a hatred of Big Tech, and then there are the "Khanservatives" - JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Matt Goetz, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, etc - who aligned themselves with Biden's FTC Chair Lina Khan and professed a principled objection to Big Tech monopolies and even co-sponsored bills with the likes of Elizabeth Warren that were designed to strike at the root of tech monopolists power.

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Trumpism - like every successful political movement - is a coalition. It's made up of factions who virulently disagree on key issues, and Trump himself is the arbiter of which faction emerges triumphant and which one will have to eat shit and like it:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how…

It's pretty clear at this point that the anti-Big Tech wing of the Trump Party has lost. Trump's saber-rattling is funneling billions into Big Tech's pockets and consolidating their power.

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Nowhere is this more visible than in the UK, where PM Keir Starmer fired the country's top anti-monopoly enforcer and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/aut…

But the British giveaways to US tech monopolists don't end there. Now, Starmer's announced plans to give a £800m/year tax giveaway to US Big Tech:

bbc.com/news/articles/c8j0dgym…

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UK considers big tech tax changes to appease Donald Trump

Rachel Reeves says talks are "ongoing" about the Digital Services Tax, paid by giants like Amazon.

^{Mitchell Labiak (BBC News)}

If the Trumpist techbusters were truly sincere in their professed belief that Big Tech had too much power and must be broken up, then this should all be provoking howls of outrage from the Khanservatives - but they're all conspicuously silent.

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Riley Quinn, showrunner of the amazing Trashfuture podcast, once proposed that the conservative animus towards Big Tech was driven entirely by grievances over content moderation algorithms that downranked conspiracy theories, racial slurs, and fundraising messages from grifting far-right politicians.

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Quinn joked that these conservative techbusters could be satisfied if every Big Tech board meeting was henceforth solemnized with a "Stolen Likes Acknowledgement," in which the execs publicly repudiated the fortunes their forerunners amassed through the suffering of shadowbanned culture warriors. Think of it as a Twitter Files mirror world doppelganger of the "stolen land" acknowledgments often heard before progressive meetings and presentations:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not…

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For its part, the EU is holding its ground in the face of Trumpism. Indeed, Trump's obnoxious belligerence has trashed the popularity of many of the EU's far right parties, especially in Scandinavia, where the burgeoning neofascist movement has lost nearly all momentum in the face of Trump's threats to annex Greenland away from Denmark:

bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0718g…

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Greenland condemns planned visits by Usha Vance and Trump adviser

The pair will make separate trips this week, after threats from the US president to take over the island.

^{James FitzGerald (BBC News)}

(The same thing has happened in Canada, where the Trumpist Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has seen his massive polling leads collapse on the eve of a snap election):

cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory…

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