Some GOP lawmakers are grumbling over President Trump’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of billionaire allies such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who were featured prominently at Trump’s inauguration last week.
But more egregious than any of those boldfaced names was TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s place of honor on the stage at Trump’s inauguration. Trump gave TikTok a major reprieve shortly after the swearing-in by signing an executive order to suspend the TikTok ban supported by many Republicans in Congress for 75 days.
“It’s a concern; it’s a concern; I don’t love it,” said one Republican senator who supports the TikTok ban and has misgivings about the past censorship of conservative opinions by prominent California-based social media companies.
Republican senators are rushing to confirm Trump’s official Cabinet nominees such as Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general and Scott Bessent to serve as Treasury secretary but some of them are expressing skepticism about the tech titans who are jockeying to be in Trump’s inner circle of informal advisers.
A number of GOP lawmakers view the modern-day Masters of the Universe who were guests of honor at Trump’s inauguration as the epitome of the coastal “elites” who Trump campaigned against throughout the 2024 election.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he wished Trump had some firefighters and other working-class heroes to balance out the billionaires on stage with him at the inauguration.
“I was thinking that it would be nice to have some firefighters and soup kitchen operators,” he said.
Cramer noted that California’s powerful tech leaders have long been more allied with Democrats than Republicans, and he argued they are now trying to buy their way in to Trump’s good graces.
“Those people have never been our friends until recently as they try to buy their way in,” he said of the billionaires cozying up to Trump who have been at odds with the MAGA movement in the past.
Cramer quipped that Republicans will accept eleventh-hour conversions.
“I’m all for them coming on board becoming free-speech advocates, finally,” he said. “It was a little weird.”
Trump and Bezos feuded fiercely during Trump’s first term, with much of the animosity stemming from The Washington Post’s coverage of his administration.
Trump fulminated against what he called “The Fake News Washington Post” and accused Amazon of unfairly avoiding state and local taxes while freeloading on the U.S. Postal Service.
He accused Bezos of using The Washington Post as a “big tax shelter” for his profits at Amazon.
Trump also crossed swords with Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which suspended the president from its platform for two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
Zuckerberg also ran afoul of conservative critics because of Facebook’s censorship of controversial opinions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The co-founder of Facebook later told House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a letter that White House officials pressured him to take down some COVID-19-related content, including humorous and satirical posts.
Google, another Silicon Valley giant, has also been accused of censorship by conservatives.
Missouri’s Republican attorney general announced in October that he had launched an investigation into Google for censoring conservative speech during the 2024 election.
Trump himself accused Google in 2018 of “suppressing voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”
“They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Trump declared in a post online at the time.
Amazon, Meta — the parent company of Facebook — and Google each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. But Republicans are warning that the nation’s tech titans can’t erase history so easily.
“If they were looking to buy their peace with the Trump administration, I think they’re fooling themselves,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.
“It’s hard to know what their calculation is other than they’re dealing with the reality that Trump’s going to be there. I’m sure they’d like to at least maintain some line of communication,” he added.
One issue of major importance to tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from liability for third-party content on their sites.
Trump pushed hard for the repeal of Section 230 during his first term and even went so far as to veto the annual national defense authorization act in 2020 because it did not include it.
Trump at the time called Section 230 “a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity.”
But Republicans who support repealing Section 230 now wonder if Trump will still be so eager to take on liability protection for major tech platforms now that they’re paying homage to him and pouring money into his political coffers.
Trump reversed his previous support for the so-called TikTok ban, which he vocally supported during his first term.
He ordered the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest its ownership from TikTok in 2020, following a unanimous recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
But on Monday he signed an executive order that paused the ban passed last year by Congress — and supported by many GOP lawmakers — for 75 days.
That move didn’t sit so well with some of Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a leading proponent of the ban, warned “any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law.”
He issued that statement on Jan. 19 after the Biden White House signaled it wouldn’t enforce the TikTok ban.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), another staunch Trump ally, said he still backs the law 100 percent.
“I’d vote for it again. Absolutely. It’s a national security issue. To me, it’s not even debatable. CCP’s got their fingers all in it,” he said, referring to the Communist Party of China.
