Zuck and Trump: What’s the Deal?

There is so much…sh*t flooding the zone of late, it’s hard to grok it all. But when the CEO of one of the richest and most morally questionable companies in tech’s history leverages his access to lobby the President of the United States, and it’s just yet another WTF headline, well, it bears comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest man in the world, visited President Trump, the 700th richest man in the world. His goal? To get the President to call off Meta’s impending antitrust trial, one that could go very poorly for the company, both because of the evidence and testimony such a trial would bring the public light, and because one of the possible remedies would be breaking up Meta entirely.

Now, in a normal world, we could trust that the President of the United States would never take a meeting with the CEO of a company facing a major antitrust action. The optics alone would kill such a request, and in the times Before Trump, optics mattered. But optics no longer matter. Trump is happy to take any meeting that might be to his advantage. He’s running the country like a mafia boss who demands his cut. A muscle racket, I believe it’s called.

Which raises a new set of questions. What might Zuckerberg give Trump to get him to kill the DOJ trial? Well, let’s start with the fact that anyone can pay off our President by quietly directing a…