Mark Zuckerberg can see that the DEI game is up

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg’s dinner with Donald Trump is a signal of something significant - David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

There must have been at least a few awkward moments when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, joined Donald Trump for a Thanksgiving week dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. They can hardly be described as natural buddies. After he was banned from Meta platforms in the wake of the Capital Hill riots, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with jail if he interfered in the 2024 election. The Facebook founder is a backer of liberal-Left causes, and has made Sir Nick Clegg, the former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, his main political fixer.

Even so, the dinner was a signal of something significant. The tech elite, and corporate America more broadly, are ready to make their peace with Trump.

It is not hard to understand why. They can see how the mood of the country has changed. There is no point in getting into a fight with a president who has just been elected with an overwhelming majority, and secured both houses of Congress. Like it or not, the Republicans will be in control of all parts of the US federal government for the next two years at least, and perhaps for much longer.

There is much more to it than that, however. For one thing, Trump’s victory confirms the demise of the whole woke, DEI agenda. He stormed to victory off the back of a historically diverse Right-wing coalition that readily embraced his message that meritocracy again had to take precedence over quotas and identity politics. Corporate America is fast beginning to see that unconscious bias training, pronouns, social justice programmes and the rest are well-past their sell-by date. Walmart, America’s largest private sector employer, announced that it was abandoning much of its DEI agenda, for example, earlier this week. Others are sure to follow.

But there is also genuine enthusiasm for Trump’s economic agenda at the commanding heights of America’s big corporations. Of course, nobody is likely to get as close to the president as Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss, who campaigned energetically for him when the result was still widely seen as too close to call. But prepare to see more and more business leaders come out to back the president-elect’s drive to re-boot the competitiveness of the American economy, and to defend US enterprises against the anti-tech drive of the European Union. In Trump’s first term, he was often at war with the tech industry, and especially the social media barons. In his second term, they may all be on the same team.

Of course there may well be some commercial spin-offs as well. Zuckerberg is no doubt hoping that the anti-trust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission against Meta will be downplayed, and that Trump will stand up robustly to the European Union if it imposes more and more ridiculous fines on his company.

There may be a few opportunities as well for anyone on the right side of the White House. Zuckerberg might well be interested in buying TikTok if its Chinese owners are forced to sell its Western operations. And if Alphabet is forced to sell off its Chrome browser, as the Department of Justice has demanded, he would surely love to add that to his empire as well. There will be plenty of deal-making to be done over the next few years and it is helpful to have the president on board.

But the important point is this. Corporate America is showing that its liberalism was only ever skin deep. Yes, some of these companies’ more progressive staff will complain about their corporate leaders breaking bread with the “enemy”. But big business is ready to cut a deal with the incoming president – and will do its best to make the next four years work.