If you need some, uh, different bad news to break up your already bad news day, here’s some: Google just donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, per The Washington Post. (We can’t use Bing anymore either, because that’s an AI wasteland. Apparently there’s an alternative engine called Swisscows.com? That one sounds nice.)
If you don’t know what the hell an inaugural fund even is, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Trump is trying to throw the biggest party in D.C. on January 20, and the search engine’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, and founder, Sergey Brin, want a spot at the table. They already had one at Mar-a-Lago; the two men dined with the president-elect last month, despite the fact that Brin was supposedly “deeply offended” by Trump’s election the first time around (per WP). Meta, Apple, and OpenAI are also vying for spots on the list with $1 million donated apiece.
The potential motivation behind Google’s decision is so simple it almost hurts. In addition to the basic sucking up that everyone else seems to be doing right now, Biden’s Justice Department is currently seeking to break up the company under anti-trust laws. Under Trump, that might not happen—especially if Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is on his good side.
Big tech isn’t the only industry pouring their resources into Trump’s inauguration right now. Per The New York Times, the fund has raised over $170 million for the president-elect’s swearing in, which will, coincidentally, be livestreamed on Google. If you need some schadenfreude on this brutal news day, that means that some of those donors have been placed on a waitlist to attend the ceremony, or may not get their precious V.I.P. tickets at all. Silver linings, maybe?
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