Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter
Hamby.
In tonight’s issue, among other topics, a few notes on all the tech titans who showed up at Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was a flex by the incoming president, but also a risky one, given that Trump surrounded himself with transactional billionaires and corporate cronies in full view of an American public that elected him to feel their economic pain.
But first, some Inauguration
Day notes from my partners Lauren Sherman and Abby Livingston…
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Lauren Sherman
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- Who’s stylin’
who: Pretty much every woman in politics works with a stylist, but many of those relationships remain under wraps for various reasons. Politicians and political spouses often opt for discretion—spending money on a stylist can seem frivolous—even if their heavily scrutinized wardrobes are a primary communication tool. Consider how secretive Kamala Harris and Leslie Fremar were about
their partnership; ditto Michelle Obama and Ikram Goldman in the early days.
When second lady Usha Vance stepped out Saturday for a dinner in honor of her husband, the questionof who was styling her became more important, because she looked so…
good. I’m not sure there’s been a better idea than Oscar de la Renta’s strapless, black velvet dress with a sweetheart neckline and three asymmetrical floral buttons up the front. I want that dress. Turns out Isabella Nardone, a virtual unknown, is working with both Vances. (Sounds like a family friend situation.)
Ivanka Trump, who wore forest green Dior to the inauguration, has worked with
Dania Lucero Ortiz, the Town & Country fashion and accessories director, for some time. And everyone knows that Melania’s stylist is a guy named Hervé Pierre Braillard, who used to be Carolina Herrera’s right hand. She wore custom Adam Lippes that I mistook for Dior at first glance. With good reason: LVMH C.E.O. Bernard
Arnault, his wife, Hélène Mercier, and his children Delphine and Alexandre—the heads of the first and second cohorts of kids, respectively—were all in attendance as a show of support for Trump.
I know there’s been some moralizing about all this within the fashion community, but some people—and not just Republicans—view it as purely business. Some may have the financial independence to sit this one out, but not everyone. And
others feel like they simply do not have a choice other than to engage.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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Abby Livingston
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- Inauguration
truancy & Biden repulsion: For Hill Democrats, Donald Trump’s inauguration day was as long and miserable as it was cold: The swearing-in ceremony took place in the same room as some of the most brutal January 6 violence; Obama and the Clintons were booed there, as was the outgoing president, minutes after he pardoned another tranche of family members. Then there was Trump, himself. “He behaved until he gave his off the cuff speech,” as one Democratic chief
of staff put it, regarding the president’s post-inaugural remarks in which he once again declared his 2020 loss “rigged” and crowed, “This time we made it too big to rig; it was so big.” There was, at least, a little levity caught on tape: Hillary outright laughing when Trump vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
All of this was to be expected, of course, and many Democratic strategists weren’t even watching. “Literally every Democratic operative I
know is on vacation somewhere outside of the U.S. right now,” one plugged-in Dem told me. Operatives generally use their campaign trail-accumulated travel points to take post-election vacations in November and December, but given the Trump of it all, it makes sense why the opposition’s political class waited until this week to visit Paris and parts of Mexico. This weekend’s uninspired attempt to resurrect the 2017 Women’s March, for example, was the latest data point suggesting that Democrats
have retreated to lick their wounds and regroup. As one House staffer told me, “Everyone is so exhausted, and just trying to sort of check out as much as possible.”
And yet, the day offered at least one silver lining for Democrats: the exit of Joe Biden. The party has been at war with itself for the past year, and, apart from the actual conflict in Gaza, the main source of conflict has been its leader. And in lieu of the traditional, becalmed presidential
farewell tour, the Bidens went out swinging, escalating their war with Nancy Pelosi, who did the party’s dirty work in pushing the president to withdraw from the race last summer. In The Washington Post last week, Jill pronounced Pelosi’s intervention “very disappointing.” Two days later, Pelosi’s
daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, fired back, telling Politico that “Lady McBiden” needed to put on her “big girl pants” and “think about [her] husband’s legacy.”
As the Bidens choppered away in the presidential helicopter for the final time, several senior Democrats texted me their dismay with Biden’s last-minute,
preemptive family pardons. (Biden also included other potential targets on Trump’s vengeance wish list: Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, and Anthony Fauci.) While some liberals thought these were smart defensive moves, others were furious about the precedent it set for an outgoing Trump administration four years from now—and curious why members of Biden’s family the public had never heard of, such as his sister Val and her husband,
John Owens, would need pardons in the first place. As one Biden appointee texted me, the family pardons gave “credence, as they packed their bags, to bogus ‘Biden crime family’ narratives the right is foaming at the mouth to pick up and drive. Mission accomplished!”
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The president has always possessed a magical ability to convince
voters that he’s still an Imus-style populist, even as he conducts his corporate favor trading practically in the open. But watching Trump at the inauguration, flanked by a platoon of billionaire supplicants, you have to wonder how long he can keep wearing the outsider mask.
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Watching CNN’s coverage of Donald Trump’s
inauguration this morning, I was struck by the social hierarchy of the procession into the Capitol Rotunda, a grand neoclassical dome that has never housed more Botox or male eye lifts than it did on Monday. Among the first to trickle in were various MAGA dignitaries and paunchy donors, followed by senators and members of Congress, John Fetterman in his shorts, Tim Burchett in his usual Carhartt barn jacket. On Twitter/X, I saw that the Nelk Boys were riding
over on a bus with Theo Von, Conor McGregor, and Jake and Logan Paul, posting content all the while. But Dana Bash brought my eyes back to the television when she interrupted Jake Tapper to point out the gaggle of tech billionaires who had moved in to take their seats just behind Trump’s family, only feet from the incoming president’s podium. “I’m sorry to cut you off Jake, but
some of these tech giants and their spouses are sitting in front of Trump’s cabinet,” she said. “They have better seats than the people who are going to run Trump’s administration!”
Bash, who has covered Capitol Hill forever, also noted that several of the tech C.E.O.s in attendance had their wives and fiancées with them, while Trump’s cabinet picks didn’t even get plus-ones. Mark Zuckerberg was there with Priscilla
Chan, Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sánchez. Of course, Elon Musk was in the mix, too, along with Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin, and Sam Altman. Getting less attention from the D.C. press, but wealthier than most of the dais by many billions, was Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O. and mastermind behind LVMH, who attended with his wife Hélène,
daughter Delphine, and son Alexandre. (Fashion may be a deeply liberal industry, but nothing says post-partisanship like the threat of tariffs on handbags and cognac.) Financiers Isaac Perlmutter and John Paulson also had choice seats.
Susan Li of Fox Business calculated that
the richest of the rich in attendance—Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Arnault, Cook, and Bezos—represented companies with more than $11 trillion in market value. Also showing up to kiss the ring: TikTok C.E.O. Shou Zi Chew, who has embarrassed himself in spectacularly desperate fashion by begging Trump, in public and private, to unwind the U.S. law pushing TikTok out of the country, while weaponizing his own platform as a corporate propaganda machine aimed at millions of young users.
(TikTok got a late assist from weak-kneed Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Ed Markey,and Cory Booker: Worried about getting dragged online by screen-addicted teenagers as the deadline approached, they pushed for a delay on the ban, even though the same Democrats literally voted for the Biden-backed law last year, citing serious national security concerns.)
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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I’m not listing these bold-faced names to mimic Playbook, but
rather to highlight the great distance Trump has traveled from the anti-establishment Swamp Drainer of 2016 to his current position at the center of the American elite. This was not a tableau that Steve Bannon and his America First crowd would have chosen. It is true that Trump became the Republican establishment when MAGA swallowed the G.O.P. many years ago, and all the while, Trump was never shy about giving powerful corporate interests a seat at the table, as long as the
invite was hashed out in the lobby of a gilded Trump property. But whether in the White House or not, Trump has always possessed a magical ability to convince voters that he’s still a populist outsider, the anti-politician, fighting for Joe and Jane Six-Pack against the “elites”—even as he takes private Mar-a-Lago meetings with multibillionaires expecting favors in return for their campaign checks.
As
rich as Trump is, or pretends to be, his man-of-the-people shtick somehow works—in part, because he’s really never been a free market Wall Street absolutist in the classic Republican mold. He has authentic, albeit simplistic, convictions about protecting American workers against the perils of free trade. In the decades of union battles that have flared between labor and management, Trump is the only politician I can think of who can realistically hang out on both sides of the picket line.
There’s a reason that some of his earliest donors during the 2016 primaries were used car dealers and people who wear Salt Life t-shirts, not the same old Bushie types hosting fundraisers in Indian Hills or Southampton.
Trump didn’t talk like the WASPs at the country clubs his supporters couldn’t get into. He sounded more like Rush or Don Imus, politically incorrect, full send. So much ink has been spilled on
this topic that it’s now a cliché, but Trump’s signature talent is the ability to play to the cultural impulses of the working class while also fattening the portfolios of the wealthy. (Or, more recently, the Coinbase and Kraken accounts of crypto goons.)
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The Silicon Valley-D.C. Cabal
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Since the election, we’ve watched a parade of executives from
seemingly every sector of the American economy—sports, tech, finance, media, even corners of Hollywood—genuflecting before Trump as he returns to power. It’s not just a selfish charade. Trump won the election outright, he dominated the cultural conversation, and Democrats got left behind. Corporate America is reacting accordingly. Under any administration, it would be hard to find fault with a C.E.O. for wanting to establish a healthy relationship with a president in full command of the
government.
Meanwhile, Democrats have lost their cachet. Their voters are tuning out the news, and Democratic politicians are retreating to their own states and districts, biding their time and waiting for Trump to overstep. Until then, maybe voters won’t care about whatever corporate cronyism comes to pass in Trump’s Washington, as long as the cost of living stabilizes, interest rates fall, and
world conflicts fade (all big ifs).
But watching Trump at the inauguration, flanked by a platoon of billionaire supplicants and unaccountable tech C.E.O.s, you have to wonder how long this president can keep wearing the outsider mask. Can Republicans like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley credibly rage against “Big Tech” in Senate hearings when pretty much every major tech leader is kissing Trump’s ass in full view of the American
public? How can there be a Deep State-Silicon Valley cabal when Democrats are out of power and tech execs like Zuck are getting rid of trust-and-safety protocols and the “political bias” of content moderators? What was J.D. Vance’s inner monologue while standing right next to the same social media evildoers he’s been howling about for years, as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham looked on, beaming? Or did Vance revert to V.C. form?
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Can Trump plausibly claim to be standing up to powerful tech overlords and moneyed
interests when every photo and camera angle shows him surrounded by America’s private sector royalty? Thought about another way: Trump has always derived his power from running against enemies—hated elites and the establishment. But who do you run against when you win so bigly that your enemies just give up and join your team?
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No matter how smashing his victory, as I
wrote a few weeks ago, Trump notably remains a one-term president with a midterm election coming up next year. The new president may indeed usher in a “golden age of America,” as he promised Monday at the Capitol, but he only has a limited window of time to establish this new epoch of winning. It’s worth noting that as he takes office, like any incoming president, Trump is
probably at the peak of his powers. His favorable rating as he returns to office is at an all-time high—but that high is just 46 percent. More Americans—48 percent—continue to have an unfavorable view of the president.
The harem of billionaires that Trump put on display on Monday was intended as a flex. But I thought it was a curious public relations gambit, a dangerous self-own for a president supposedly aligned with the common man,
people who didn’t go to college and work with their hands. With apologies to Luigi Mangione, most Americans don’t reflexively hate billionaires in the way that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders think they do. But it’s a timeless political truth that voters are skeptical of powerful corporations, the whiff of corruption, and a government that doles out favors to privileged insiders over the public. Any poll will tell you that, no matter who is
president.
Indeed, there is already some suspicion among the electorate about how Trump might reward all these C.E.O.s scrumming to get at his teat—especially when it comes to Musk, the world’s richest man, who has been following the new president around like a middle schooler with a crush since at least October. A Quinnipiac poll
found that a majority of registered voters—53 percent—disapprove of “businessman Elon Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration.” That disapproval rating is even higher among independents, while only 41 percent of voters approve of Musk’s involvement.
Those poll numbers, I suspect, will only get worse once the Trump administration gets underway. I also don’t need a poll to know that
Zuckerberg is someone that no normal American would want to hang out with at a party. Nor would they want to awkwardly chit-chat with Altman about large language models or share a bottle of Chenin Blanc with the hosts of the All-In podcast and gab about their funds. It’s an even safer bet that none of the tech barons onstage with Trump today, nor most of the people invited to the best parties in Washington this weekend, would ever choose to spend time in Council Bluffs or Johnstown or
Toledo or any corner of “forgotten America” that Trump has sworn to protect.
Trump’s diminished opponents don’t have much to work with these days. But flanked by Bezos and Zuck and Musk, the new president gifted them an image to use, if they so choose: a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy. It’s the kind of thing that would have once been dismissed as a conspiracy—the
smoke-filled room where rich plutocrats huddled with politicians to plot their next moves, the country be damned. But here it was, in plain view inside the Capitol Rotunda.
President Biden left office this week without much credibility left, but his last-minute warning about a coming oligarchy now doesn’t seem off-base, even if most of the oligarchs are rich nerds. If Democrats weren’t so transparently spooked by young people’s addiction to TikTok, they could make
a political issue out of Trump and Chew colluding in broad daylight to protect a massive profit-driven corporation, in what appears to be one of the most corrupt handshake deals in the history of the United States. But that would require some truth-telling and bravery from a party that, right now, is afraid of its own tiny shadow.
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