ABC gave Donald Trump $15 million it didn’t have to, in the latest example of American elites’ paying homage to the incoming president.
Trump had sued Disney-owned ABC for defamation because anchor George Stephanopoulos said on air that Trump had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case, but the jury had found that Trump was liable only for sexual abuse, not rape. ABC had a strong case on the merits, since the presiding judge said Trump’s actions, while technically not “rape” under New York state law, met the common understanding of “rape.” Additionally, U.S. law sets an especially high bar for defamation regarding media coverage of public figures. But despite the attorneys and deep pockets to fight the lawsuit, ABC/Disney folded, even agreeing to pay an additional $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees.
These media and tech industry leaders are weakly obeying in advance, potentially corrupting the system to Trump’s benefit without being forced.
Trumpists already control a lot of the information environment — Fox News, many leading websites and podcasts, the social network X, etc. — but others are signaling they’ll play along. ABC’s voluntary payment adds to the distortions and brown-nosing from the billionaires who respectively own the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in September declared his intention to stay out of politics, gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and traveled to Trump’s Florida home for a private meeting. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ main company, Amazon, is also giving $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, as well as streaming the event on Prime for free.
These media and tech industry leaders are weakly obeying in advance, potentially corrupting the system to Trump’s benefit without being forced. It’s bad for the country, but they’re for-profit business executives, not opposition politicians.
Opposition is the Democratic Party’s job. Yet even some prominent Democrats have reduced their criticisms, seeking to “find common ground.”
Among the worst was President Joe Biden’s taking smiling photos with Trump at the White House. Biden is right to respect the 2024 election results and conduct the transfer of power, but he doesn’t need to treat the incoming administration as normal. The smiling photos signal to the public that calling Trump a fascist enemy of constitutional democracy was merely campaign hyperbole.
If Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris attend Trump’s inauguration — he didn’t attend theirs, and he had attempted a coup to prevent it — it will repeat the signal that everything’s fine. If they and former presidents attend, it would also contrast with the 2024 Republican National Convention, which (other than Trump) no former president or vice president attended.
Harris has mostly been quiet since the election. To the extent Biden has offered public criticism of the incoming administration, it’s of a powerless, pleading variety. “I pray to God that the president-elect throws away Project 2025,” the still-president posted on X. “I think it would be an economic disaster. I believe the only way for a president to lead America is to lead all of America.”
Meanwhile, Trump has announced that Project 2025 architect Russ Vought will be the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., joined Trump’s website, Truth Social, announcing in his opening post that the “Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bulls–t… weaponizing the judiciary for blatant partisan gain.”
This falsely equates a private citizen’s lying on a gun form and failing to pay taxes with a president’s election-related felony fraud, effectively letting Trump off the hook. Fetterman didn’t explain how the jury of citizens that found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts was partisan.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has been publicly boosting Trump donor/surrogate/adviser Elon Musk, arguing on CNN that “Elon Musk is the champion among the big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles.”
Opposition is the Democratic Party’s job. Yet even some prominent Democrats have reduced their criticisms, seeking to ‘find common ground.’
That’s the opposite of true. As the owner of X, Musk has censored political speech at government request in Turkey, India and China. He has censored terms he personally dislikes, such as “cisgender.” As a prominent Trump supporter, he has put a heavy thumb on the algorithmic scale in favor of his political views. He has filed lawsuits against people who say factually accurate things he doesn’t like in an attempt to shut them up, and he encourages online mobs to harass people he dislikes into silence, marking him as an enemy to a culture of free speech. Speaking of Musk, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has conducted a public campaign of support for “DOGE,” Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. It’s not a department; it’s an advisory panel with no authority. Its recommendations are absurd — not just undesirable, but literally innumerate — and it looks like it could become an excuse for corruption. Khanna apparently thinks it’s worth acting otherwise. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., apparently does, too. He’s the sort of person one would expect to rail against a presidential administration stocked with self-dealing billionaires, but he took to Musk’s website to declare “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.” But Musk has never proposed broad cuts to the U.S. military budget. His company SpaceX is a defense contractor; another of his companies, Tesla, receives massive government subsidies; and many suspect he’ll use his newfound influence to funnel more money into his own pocket. Under a generous interpretation, perhaps Sanders, Khanna and other Democrats speaking positively of Musk are trying to flatter him into working with them or use the attention DOGE is getting to draw some attention to military spending they oppose or making a show of trying to work with him now so they’ll be in a better position to criticize him when his bad faith and self-dealing are inevitably exposed. If so, it’s too cute by half, misunderstanding the political moment and the information environment. There’s no sign their obsequiousness has gotten Trump and Musk to incorporate Democrats’ ideas. But it did generate eye-grabbing headlines about how even Bernie Sanders supports DOGE’s efforts and thinks Musk is “very smart.” Sanders’ contribution to public understanding of Musk and DOGE is advancing the false impression that it’s a praiseworthy good-faith effort. It really isn’t. Whatever their intentions, too many Democrats are signaling to the public that earlier warnings about a second Trump presidency can be dismissed. A lot of the media will cover Trump positively, omitting and distorting facts that make him look bad. Democrats’ playing along probably won’t yield policy concessions, but it will help normalize authoritarianism. If Democrats aren’t acting like a pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law opposition, then the large swath of the public that doesn’t closely follow politics will think everything’s fine until Trump policies negatively affect them directly, and more will buy the lie that he’s not to blame.
Nicholas Grossman
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of "Drones and Terrorism." 
