Trump Will Have a Shocking Entourage at His Inauguration

Silicon Valley is apparently all in on Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.

World’s-richest-man Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos are slated to attend the forty-seventh president’s inauguration next week, according to NBC News. The tech trio will be seated alongside elected officials and Trump’s Cabinet selections.

The industry leaders—and their respective companies—have opportunistically caved to the incoming president’s politics since he won in November, in an apparent bid to curry favor with the executive.

Trump’s second term could prove to be a new leaf for the tech industry, which faced heightened scrutiny under President Joe Biden’s administration. Meta, Google, Amazon, and several other tech giants have faced blowback from antitrust regulators critical of the industry’s biggest monopolies over the last four years. The government also sought to tighten regulations on a bubbling AI industry.

Rapid developments in tech are already proving to be a major strain on the nation’s infrastructure: In August, taxpayers in Texas paid Riot Platforms $31 million not to mine bitcoin in an effort to stave off rolling blackouts and spare the state’s electric grid.

The tech industry’s support has helped Trump best his 2017 inaugural fundraising records, raising more than $170 million ahead of next week’s presidential celebration. A coalition of top tech heads, including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, all pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Meanwhile, Musk has further ingratiated himself into Trump’s sphere, effectively bankrolling the 78-year-old’s pathway back to the White House with a $250 million donation. That earned Musk nearly unfettered access to Trump, as well as a not-yet-real position co-chairing the not-yet-authorized Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

But the sudden ingratiation hasn’t come without issue in Trumpworld: Over the weekend, Trump’s former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon lambasted Musk as a “truly evil guy” whom he planned to force out of the MAGA leader’s sphere by Inauguration Day.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, was unable to name a single country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations during his confirmation hearing Tuesday—even naming Australia instead.

Senator Tammy Duckworth asked Hegseth to speak to the importance of the political and economic alliance, in an effort to make a point of how unqualified he was to lead the Pentagon and its massive workforce.

“You talked about the Indo-Pacific a little bit.… Can you name the importance of at least one of the nations in ASEAN, and what type of agreement we have with at least one of those nations? And how many nations are in ASEAN, by the way?

“I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of nations in that, but I know we have allies in South Korea, and Japan, and in AUKUS with Australia, [we] work on submarines with them …”

“Mr. Hegseth none of those countries are in ASEAN. None of those three countries that you’ve mentioned are in ASEAN,” Duckworth replied. “I suggest you do a little homework before you prepare for these types of negotiations.”

“This might seem like a small, embarrassing gotcha, but ASEAN is an acronym you encounter a lot if you do even very basic reading about the Pentagon’s strategy to counter China,” Yahoo’s Jordan Weissman wrote on X.

ASEAN consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The United States regularly conducts joint military exercises with the member states.

During his confirmation hearings for secretary of defense Tuesday, Pete Hegseth was asked about cashing in from the defense industry—and refused to give a straight answer.

Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out that Hegseth had previously written that after generals retire from the military, they “should be banned from working for the defense industry for 10 years,” noting that she agrees with Hegseth “on the corrosive effects of the revolving door of the Pentagon and defense contractors.”

Warren then asked Hegseth, “Will you put your money where your mouth is and agree that when you leave this job you will not work for the defense industry for 10 years?”

At first, Hegseth tried to deflect, saying that “it’s not even a question I’ve thought about.” Warren pressed him further.

“My motivation for this job has never been about what could conceivably come next,” Hegseth replied, appearing to carefully weigh his words. Warren then asked point-blank for a yes or no answer, and Hegseth refused.

“I would consult with the president about what the policy should be at the Defense Department,” Hegseth said, and Warren was incredulous.

“In other words, you are quite sure that every general who serves should not go directly into the defense industry for 10 years. You’re not willing to make that same pledge?” the Massachusetts Democrat asked.

“I’m not a general, senator,” Hegseth replied, pointedly leaving the door open for a plum job from the defense industry in the future and drawing laughs in the hearing room.

“So you are saying, sauce for the goose but certainly not sauce for the gander?” Warren asked, with Hegseth again saying he’d have to see what the policy is, to which Warren replied, “Oh, I’ll bet you would.”

It’s a clear and obvious admission that Hegseth, now that he’s close to heading the Department of Defense, can see dollar signs down the road in the defense industry that he’s previously criticized. It’s another example of Hegseth backtracking on his earlier statements and writings in Tuesday’s hearing, but, in this case, on something that was actually a good idea.

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he wants to invent a totally redundant federal statutory body.

“For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.

“I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

For a guy interested in shrinking the size of government, Trump sure keeps adding to it. The U.S. already has a way of setting and collecting tariffs, but to Trump’s credit, it never had a stupid name before. After the secretary of the treasury establishes regulations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection—housed within the Department of Homeland Security—is responsible for administering the tariffs at U.S. ports of entry. The money is then deposited into the General Fund of the United States.

Trump has promised to enact 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican and Canadian goods on his first day in office—an economic show of force he clearly thinks could result in the annexation of Canada—and another 10 percent tariff on imports from China.

While Trump is at it, he could invent several other badly named governmental bodies to carry out his administration’s insipid agenda. Here are some humble suggestions:

1. Consumer Product Danger Commission: Determines whether products are getting too woke.
2. Environmental Defenselessness Agency: Ensures that the U.S. government can do whatever it wants to protected lands for the sake of endless production and accumulation of capital.
3. Anti-Social Security Agency: Destabilize Social Security by cutting payroll taxes. Hell, maybe take the whole thing private?

In any case, this whole thing feels eerily similar to his pitch to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” A purely aesthetic change that Trump imagines will build his legacy as a powerful leader—and not a global laughingstock.

From New York to San Francisco, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has greenlighted a corporate cultural regression, instantaneously allowing companies to backtrack on years of climate goals and diversity and inclusion efforts with the anti-woke politico on the horizon.

Wall Street brokers and tech bros alike are celebrating the switch, claiming that they no longer feel the need to culturally consider women, minorities, or disabled people while they talk, reported the Financial Times.

“I feel liberated,” one top banker told the paper. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.… It’s a new dawn.”

Those working in New York’s financial sector also feel that they can ditch their social causes. A number of major Wall Street banks and money managers have quit industry groups focused on climate change and cutting carbon emissions, feeling that they instead can go full-throttle on making money without facing social repercussions.

“Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” another Wall Streeter told the pink page.

Another major corporate shift has effectively left behind DEI initiatives. That began when the Supreme Court ruled on the diversity program in 2023, but the “trickle became a flood” after Trump’s election victory, with companies such as Harley Davidson, Ford, Molson Coors, Walmart, and McDonalds peeling back on their corporate diversity commitments, according to the Financial Times.

“They don’t want to be caught out promising and not delivering,” Richard Edelman, chief executive of public relations group Edelman, told the paper. “Companies are still committed to diversity and they’re committed to inclusion, they just don’t want to guarantee outcomes.”

Silicon Valley is also seemingly all in on Trump’s forthcoming presidency, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos slated to attend the forty-seventh president’s inauguration next week alongside his Cabinet selections, according to NBC News.

The trio have courted Trump’s favor in the weeks since Trump won the presidential election, caving—in their own ways—to the climate of the forthcoming administration. Meta and X have heavily reduced their content-moderation policies, allowing disturbing language to circulate openly on their platforms, while Bezos canceled The Washington Post’s (which he owns) plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy.

A coalition of top tech heads, including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, all pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, according to the Financial Times.

Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer a series of important questions during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

“I have read multiple reports of your regularly being drunk at work, including by people who worked with you at Fox News,” Senator Mazie Hirono asked Hegseth. “Do you know that being drunk at work is prohibited for service members under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)?”

“Senator, those are multiple false reports peddled by NBC News—”

“I’m not hearing the answer to my question,” Hirono said while Hegseth tried to speak over her.

“You recently promised some of my Republican colleagues that you stopped drinking, and won’t drink if confirmed, correct?” she continued. Hegseth confirmed it to be “absolutely” true.

“Will you resign as secretary of defense if you drink on the job, which is a 24/7 position?” Hirono followed up.

Hegseth started to answer the question indirectly, prompting Hirono to repeat the question. Hegseth again deflected. “I’m not hearing an answer to my question, so I will move on,” Hirono said again calmly.

Hegseth has been accused by former co-workers of being drunk on the job, even reportedly once yelling, “Kill all Muslims” while inebriated at a work event.

Hirono then moved on to questions about using police and the military against protesters.

“In 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?” asked Hirono, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests that summer.

“I was in the National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events—”

Hirono interrupted, asking her question again: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs, as directed to Secretary Esper?” Hegseth continued talking while she talked.

“You know what, that sounds to me that you will comply with such an order; you will shoot protesters in the leg,” Hirono replied. “Moving on!”

Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the MAGA movement, has turned his ire against yet another supplicant snake from Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg.

During an episode of his War Room podcast Monday, Bannon took aim at the CEO of Meta, who recently announced a slate of changes to the company’s platforms designed to delight the president-elect. Bannon was less than impressed.

“The corporations are all down there right now with their little million-dollar checks, and they want to come to the, you know, they want to come to the inauguration. They want to wear black tie and pal around and go to all the receptions. That’s all fine. That’s part of an American tradition,” Bannon said. “But those corporations, and particularly the tech corporations, there’s some comments I have in the New York Post today with the great Miranda Devine, talking about Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg can’t be trusted—at all!”

Bannon said he’d gone “absolutely bonkers” when Zuckerberg had been allowed in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, especially considering that the Meta chief had later “put up $450 million of his own money to steal the 2020 election.”

In fact, Zuckerberg and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations, which doled out grants to state and local governments so they could adapt to Covid-19-era election restrictions in 2020. Zuckerberg later attempted to distance himself from these donations, saying that he intended to “be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or even appear to be playing a role.” This was only after Trump had threatened him with jail time.

“These guys are supplicants now because President Trump is coming in with the American people, have his back. But after six months—a year of hard fighting and resistance at the administrative state and deep level, and the corporations, is Zuckerberg and these guys can be counted on? Only thing they can be counted on is to look after their own self-interest. That’s it,” Bannon said.

While Zuckerberg’s attempts to shift his company rightward and obey in advance by removing some hate-speech restrictions and third-party fact-checking from his sites indicate a serious sycophantism, it seems that Bannon has no time for those who are new to this, not true to this.

That might explain why he recently went after another technocrat clinging to Trump’s coattails, Elon Musk, whom he derided as a “truly evil guy.”

In Devine’s New York Post op-ed published Sunday, Bannon called Zuckerberg “the worst of the worst.”

“He had the biggest platform and went out of his way to try to crush the truth. Remember what he did to the laptop and anything from the pandemic?” Bannon said, referring to Zuckerberg’s decision to “demote” stories about Hunter Biden while waiting for fact-checkers to assess the validity of the story—a decision that the technocrat has since said he regrets. He’s since gotten rid of fact-checking altogether, making it even easier for misinformation and propaganda to spread across his social media platforms.

“He’s been dead wrong on everything,” Bannon continued. “He’s immature and lacks the judgment to have that much power and that much control.”

During Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to serve as secretary of defense, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called out Hegseth’s comments on women serving in the military.

Hegseth claimed during the hearing, held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, that his problem is not with women—his problem is with military standards that had been changed to accommodate women in different military units. But Gillibrand demanded that Hegseth elaborate.

“Please give me an example, I get you’re making these generalized statements,” Gillibrand said.

“Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted and that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard,” Hegseth responded.

Gillibrand did not wait for Hegseth to finish before correcting him.

“Commanders do not have to have a quota for commanders in the infantry. That does not exist,” Gillibrand said emphatically. “It does not exist. And your statements are creating the impression that these exist, because they do not. There are not quotas.”

Only two months ago, Hegseth spelled out his views on women serving in the military on the Shawn Ryan Show.

“I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said at the time.

Only a few days later, Hegseth was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as defense secretary, and he has since tried to backtrack on that statement. Presumably, Trump did not have a problem with his views when he announced the nomination, having been a fan of Hegseth’s for many years.

Trump has stood by his choice of Hegseth, even as allegations of sexual and financial misconduct have surfaced. While Democrats are trying to make sure the public doesn’t forget about Hegseth’s troubling past, Trump and Senate Republicans seem to be behind his nomination all the way.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer whether or not he’d undergo an expanded FBI background check, at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“I assume you’d be willing to submit to an expanded FBI background check that interviews your colleagues, accountants, ex-wives, former spouses, sexual assault survivors, and others?” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the embattled defense secretary nominee.

“Senator, I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth replied tersely.

“But you would submit to it and support it?”

“I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth repeated before taking a sip of water.

Hegseth has submitted to an FBI background check, but it disturbingly did not include interviews with his ex-wives or any of the women who accused him of sexual assault, according to several people who spoke with NBC News. A more thorough background check could shed more light on allegations that Hegseth has vehemently denied at his hearing—sexual assault, alcoholism, financial fraud, and more. It makes sense that Hegseth pleaded the Fifth.

The MAGA fight to dissolve the Education Department is on.

North Carolina Representative David Rouzer introduced legislation in the House on Monday to eradicate the agency. H.R. 369, titled “To provide for the elimination of the Department of Education, and for other purposes,” was subsequently referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Ridding the country of its national education system will follow through on one of Donald Trump’s boldest and most Project 2025–inspired campaign promises. Other components of Trump’s agenda are quietly dependent on generating extra cashflow that the elimination of the Department of Education could (barely) muster. A major plan is extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

Republicans in favor of the extension have mused over several potential cuts to help offset that massive expenditure, including nixing the Department of Education. That would save some $200 billion from the deficit—while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s education system, which already is drowning under the pressure of historically low teacher salaries and scant resources, particularly in low-income regions. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states’.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that the plan would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.