The Scoop
Last Tuesday afternoon, just six days after Mark Zuckerberg’s third meeting with Donald Trump this year, the Meta CEO’s key antagonists in the federal government arrived in the Oval Office.
The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement.
Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta. The social media giant has pushed the president to settle a lawsuit that began in his first term, and continued through the Biden years, which seeks to force the company to divest Instagram and Whatsapp. (The FTC is an independent agency, but both Meta and many of its foes have prepared for Trump to shape the handling of the lawsuit.)
A third member of the Oval Office group was more surprising: Mike Davis, a former aide to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley who has emerged as one of Trump’s most wildly combative supporters in Washington — both on X and at his Article III Project, which describes itself as bringing “brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare.”
Davis was among the Republicans who last fall promised, and accurately anticipated, a campaign of retribution against Trump’s enemies.
While none of the participants in the meeting with Trump would share its contents, Davis appeared to refer to it in a pair of X posts last Tuesday: “Challenge accepted,” he posted at 1:32 pm, responding to a Trump supporter’s concern that Zuckerberg had the White House “on lock.” That evening, Davis replied to his own post: “Mission accomplished.”
Davis has also made his point of view clear on social media and in a recent interview on Steve Bannon’s War Room, where he is a regular contributor. Trump should break up Meta on the merits, Davis has said — and he shouldn’t make any deal with a political enemy.
“Mark Zuckerberg rigged and stole the 2020 election, and that’s why President Trump got chased out of the WH, why he faced 4 years of unprecedented, Republic-ending lawfare,” Davis said on War Room, referring to an estimated $400 million in Zuckerberg family contributions to a nonprofit effort to expand pandemic-era voting accommodations.
(The grants were accepted primarily by Democrats, though a later study found no evidence they affected the outcome of elections.)
“I just can’t believe that President Trump would let Mark Zuckerberg go into the Oval Office and take down his pants,” Davis wrote.
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Davis has aimed much of his vitriol at judges who cross the president. That includes James Boasberg, the federal judge who has ruled against Trump’s deportations of migrants to El Salvador without due process — and is also, coincidentally, hearing the Meta case.
“Resign, you putz,” was one of Davis’s milder posts about Boasberg.
Ben’s view
The Meta case offers a glimpse into how Trump’s Washington works. The president is proudly transactional, and the “art of the deal” has become a tired shibboleth in his White House.
But as executives are beginning to find, dealmaking can come into tension with another Trump value: loyalty. The rush by Zuckerberg — and other tech figures — to buy their way into the new administration has not always proven effective.
The Meta founder paid $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee and another $25 million to his presidential foundation in order to settle a lawsuit over suspending Trump’s account — direct political payments in hopes of being repaid by government action. Those payments won praise from the president and appear to have given Zuckerberg’s aides hope that they can immediately convert the investment into legal relief.
But The Wall Street Journal reported that “some of Trump’s aides have grown frustrated at the company’s lobbying strategy, believing it has been too aggressive.”
Trump’s major policy moves, slashing immigration and tariffing trade, have both directly antagonized his new would-be friends on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Many of them joined the campaign far later than Tesla’s Elon Musk — who himself only publicly endorsed Trump last July, after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.
And while antitrust matters do not seem quite as close to the president’s heart, Davis’ own views — and his presence in the White House — reflect a deep skepticism in Trump’s circle toward many of his newfound friends.
Room for Disagreement
The lawsuit’s opening on Monday without any presidential intervention defied a growing consensus that Meta had effectively coopted Trump and would use that influence to get its way on the antitrust matter.
“When Zuckerberg calls on Trump to force a quick settlement of the FTC case, will the president answer? A year ago, it seemed unthinkable. Today it seems much less so,” Casey Newton wrote that week in Platformer.
Notable
- Things have changed since Facebook dominated social media and bolted on two giant competitors, Politico notes: “There’s a case to be made that the social media market is more competitive than when Meta purchased Instagram and WhatsApp — particularly given the rapid rise of TikTok. But the FTC is likely to focus on evidence that Zuckerberg bought Instagram and WhatsApp specifically to squash competition, regardless of the current state of the market.”
- What would a settlement look like? “You could take steps to give other firms data [and] knowledge about customers that you’ve accumulated by ownership,” a former FTC Chair told the FT. “The attractiveness of the situation depends on what Meta is offering.”
- The core contention is an assault on the idea of Big Tech: “This is a critical test case for whether the antitrust laws can be used to unwind mergers designed to eliminate upstart competition,” Gene Kimmelman, a former senior official in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, told the New York Times.