Ex-Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said Sunday during an ABC News interview that the attendance of high-profile tech moguls at Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday signals their “official surrender” to the president-elect.
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Bannon, while speaking with journalist Jonathan Karl on This Week, said he wasn’t surprised by the expected appearances of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Trump’s inauguration.
“As soon as Zuckerberg said: ‘I’ve been invited. I’m going’, the floodgates opened up, and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants,” Bannon told Karl. “I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs; he broke them, and they surrendered.”
Bannon then pointed to President Joe Biden’s farewell speech last week, when the departing president warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America,” expressing his view that extreme wealth and influence threatened the nation.
“When Biden talks about that… they only became oligarchs when they flipped on him when they surrendered, and they’re going to come to Trump’s thing,” Bannon said.
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Biden warns of ‘dangerous oligarchy’ threatening US democracy in farewell address
Biden warns of ‘dangerous oligarchy’ threatening US democracy in farewell address
The former Trump aide then compared the attendance of the tech titans to Japan officially surrendering on the USS Missouri in September 1945, an event which marked the end of World War II.
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