Obeying in Advance: America's High and Mighty Submit to the New Boss

We are entering a very dangerous time, in which the pillars of economic and media power are disturbingly falling in line.

At the opening scene in The Godfather I, Don Corleone holds court at his daughter’s wedding.

First, funeral director Amerigo Bonasera pays Don Corleone obeisance by kissing his hand in return for a favor — a pledge by the mafia boss to harm a boyfriend who violated the man’s daughter.

Then hitman Luca Brasi nervously and clumsily greets the Godfather and says haltingly, “Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your home on the wedding day of your daughter. And may the first child be a masculine child. I pledge my never-ending loyalty.” He then hands over a cash-filled envelope and adds, “For your daughter’s bridal purse.”

Observing the cash haul at the wedding, made-man Paulie Gatto remarks, “Thirty, forty grand. In small bills cash, in that little silk purse. Madon’, if this was somebody else’s wedding, sfortunato!”

I can’t help but think of these scenes as one corporate CEO after another bows and scrapes before “Don” Trump at Mar-a-Lago following his electoral victory, shelling out tribute in the form of million-dollar cash payouts for his inauguration and to the Trump presidential library fund. As in The Godfather, they do so out of both fear and hopes the new Boss of Bosses will grant them favors.

Among those who have kissed the ring are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (who once banned Trump from Facebook), OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook and a growing list of other corporations, including Uber, GM, Pfizer, etc. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies that previously condemned the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and vowed to reconsider support for politicians who rejected the 2020 election results — including Ford, Goldman Sachs and AT&T — have also made large contributions to Trump’s 2025 inauguration. “People just really want to move forward and move on. The election results were very clear,” a spokesman at one of the companies mentioned in the WSJ report lamely explained.

The donations are flooding in at such a pace that Trump’s inaugural committee has so far raised more than $200 million. That amount dwarfs the $62 million for Joe Biden’s 2021 inaugural fund and doubles the $107 million raised for Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

“In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago. “This time, everyone wants to be my friend.”

Gee. Ever wonder why?

It is an American tradition to pay for presidential inaugurations and libraries through private donations. But this time, it’s different. Fear and favor rather than patriotism are largely driving the massive tributes to Trump. The contributors are being nakedly transactional. America’s high and mighty are obeying in advance.

In his bestselling book On Tyranny, Yale professor Timothy Snyder warned in 2017:

Do not obey in advance: Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then they offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

But it seems few — at least those who drive the economy and control the media — are paying heed to Snyder’s sage counsel.

Just before the November election, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, nixed editorials prepared by their editorial staffs to endorse Kamala Harris for president. 300,000 Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in protest. (When he purchased the Post in 2013, Bezos had pledged not to interfere in the paper’s news side.) And this week, the paper’s Pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after it refused to publish a satirical cartoon she submitted depicting Bezos and other media and tech barons kneeling before Donald Trump offering sacks of cash.

ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over a technical misstatement by anchor George Stephanopoulos regarding Trump’s liability for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll — a case many legal experts felt it could have easily won.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, heretofore scathingly critical of Trump, made the hegira to Mar-a-Lago in early December for a meeting with the president-elect which he described as “extremely cordial.” CNN reported that, “according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration.” A journalism professor emeritus deplored their act as a “betrayal of their colleagues, democracy, and us all. It is a disgusting show of obeisance in advance.”

Even a prominent Democrat, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is cozying up to Trump, telling ABC News he hopes the president-elect is successful in his second term and that he is not “rooting against him.” Moreover, he has endorsed MAGA congresswoman from New York Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the UN and has been meeting with Pete Hegseth and other controversial Trump nominees whom other Democrats are shunning.

Are these tribute payers and ring-kissers wasting their time?

The German industrialists who financed Hitler’s rise to power initially regarded him as a crank, a performative ex-corporal whom they could control. But as his popularity grew, they decided to hedge their bets, obey in advance and throw cash at him. In his book Hell’s Cartel, Diarmuid Jeffreys explains that German industrialists’ support of Hitler shows “what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.”

And enabling an unstable dictator-wannabe like Trump can backfire in other ways as Timothy Snyder points out,

I think it doesn’t make sense to court somebody like Trump, just psychologically, because he’s into humiliation both directions. He wants to humiliate you, and then he wants himself to be humiliated by the guys he regards as bigger men, people like Musk and by Putin. So, for him, it’s all a humiliation chain, and you’re just telling him which side of the humiliation chain you want to be on. So, I think, politically, it’s not really very effective.

In any case, we are entering a very dangerous time, where the pillars of economic and media power are disturbingly falling in line, tugging their forelock before a man historians judged the worst president in American history, a failed seditionist who is now putting the finishing touches on his plan to replace our democratic system with one more befitting that of Don Corleone.