Oligarchy dies in the light

Have the plutocrats of the internet age finally realised that all Donald Trump wanted was their love? This week, Jeff Bezos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The Amazon founder has said he’s ‘actually very optimistic’ about all the regulation slashing that Trump plans to introduce in his second term, and he’s contributed a million dollars to the Trump 47 inauguration fund.

Jeff and Donald have come a long way in eight years. Bezos’s Washington Post was a leading voice of the anti-Trump resistance between 2016 and this year. The paper changed its slogan to ‘democracy dies in darkness’ in 2017 as a sort of clarion call against what it perceived as the ills of Trumpism. Amazon and Trump have had legal battles, too. For now, however, that’s old news.

And Bezos is just one of a number of once-hostile gazillionaires who are now queueing up to honour the Donald. Mark Zuckerberg – or ‘Zuckerbucks’, as Trump calls him – spent the years between 2016 and 2020 grovelling to the political class for Facebook’s role in Trump’s election and the spread of right-wing populism across the world.