On Monday morning, during his first press conference since winning the US election in November, Donald Trump appeared to revel in the breadth of his support.
“The first term everybody was fighting me,” he said. “This term everybody wants to be my friend.”
It may have been a typically Trumpian overstatement, but the contrast between the way his first presidential term began – and ended – and the current transition to his second term eight years later is dramatic.
In just the past few weeks, many of the president-elect’s former critics and adversaries have made overtures.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Sam Altman of OpenAI have pledged million-dollar donations to Trump’s inauguration festivities.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate on Monday.
During his first term, Trump sought to ban the Chinese-owned social media company, which conservatives at the time blasted as a national security risk.
The president-elect now opposes a current effort to ban the platform, this time from the Biden administration, partially because it could help Facebook, which he has accused of aiding his 2020 election loss. The ban is scheduled to go into effect before Trump is sworn into office.
Others have also made the trek to Florida or plan to.
The day before Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg, whose Facebook had once banned Trump, travelled to the president-elect’s private club in Florida for dinner.
Google head Sundar Pichai also said he plans a sit-down meeting with the president-elect.
And when Trump appeared on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to ring the opening bell and mark his announcement as Time Magazine’s “person of the year” last week, senior executives from major US corporations gathered to watch.
“This marks a time of great promise for our nation,” Marc Benioff, head of Salesforce and owner of Time, posted on X. “We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone.”
The increasingly accommodating attitude isn’t confined solely to the corporate boardrooms. In the media, too, there has been something of a shift.
MSNBC personalities Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who host Morning Joe, visited Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump last month. “It’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but talking with him,” Brzezinski said.
And on Saturday, ABC News – which is owned by the Disney Corporation – announced that it was paying Trump $15m and legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit related to remarks made in March by morning news presenter George Stephanopoulos.
Defamation cases against media outlets require proving malice or a reckless disregard for the truth – and other news organisations have successfully fought off previous Trump lawsuits. With Trump soon returning to power, however – and the president-elect threatening new lawsuits on Monday against CBS, the Des Moines Register and the Pulitzer Prize foundation – the calculus for ABC and Disney may have changed.
A protracted legal battle with the president-elect was seemingly deemed unpalatable.
