It was unlikely that a liberal, pro-European, Big Tech, patrician ex-politician would win over the Maga crowd. Mark Zuckerberg seems to agree: Nick Clegg’s time gallivanting around Silicon Valley as a top senior executive is over. After almost seven years at Meta, most recently as its global affairs president, David Cameron’s old deputy is preparing to leave the company. His friends claim his decision is based on figuring out how he wants to spend his remaining years as a working-age man. But Donald Trump’s victory provides a more plausible explanation as to why Zuckerberg has gone cold on the former Liberal Democrat leader.
The clue lies in who is replacing Clegg. Joel Kaplan, Clegg’s current deputy, was George W Bush’s White House deputy chief of staff and is respected by conservatives for resisting restrictions on free speech from within the company, which he first joined in 2011. He attended his friend Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing to be a US Supreme Court justice in 2018 even as Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. And in 2016 his team persuaded conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck to visit the headquarters of Facebook (as Meta was then known) to meet with Zuckerberg.
Kaplan has served as a narrow bridge between Meta and the Republicans; he was once labelled by the Wall Street Journal as Meta’s “lonely conservative”. But now the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is moving behind the Trump cause – or at least getting out of the president-elect’s way. For those on the right who view Big Tech as an impregnable redoubt of wokeism, Clegg’s departure will be welcomed as a belated crack in the industry’s progressive hegemony.
That companies like Meta appear to be seeking accommodation and not antagonism with the incoming administration reflects something that many dismissed in 2016: that Trump, and what he represents, is here to stay. Back then the company lent towards the Democrats, with employees donating $1.1m to help the Hillary Clinton campaign compared with a mere $5,171 to Trump.
But with Big Tech’s traditional bedfellows smarting from defeat, it is not surprising those companies are switching sides considering Trump’s capricious style. And remember that in a caption in his third coffee-table picture book, Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg if he unlawfully influenced the 2024 election. Zuckerberg has responded by donating $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund and dining with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago.
The old guard at Meta is being moved on, making space for those who might get a hearing in the White House. Clegg’s departure is a message: Zuckerberg does not want to cause Trump trouble.
[See also: Could Donald Trump end the war in Ukraine this year?]
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