Former President Donald Trump reportedly said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told him he couldn’t vote for a Democrat in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump—claims Meta denied shortly after they were made public Monday.
Meta Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee ... [+]
Trump told New York Magazine Zuckerberg called him after he was shot and told him “there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election.”
Zuckerberg praised Trump in the call, according to Trump: “He said ‘I will never vote for the people running against you after watching what you did,’” apparently referring to Trump standing up and raising his fist in the air as he was escorted off stage by Secret Service with blood streaming from his face.
A spokesperson for Meta denied that Zuckerberg said anything about how he’d vote, telling New York Magazine “as Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.”
Trump told the magazine Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also called him and told him his reaction to the shooting was “the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched,” to which Trump said he responded “I think it was very natural what I did. I think it was natural.”
Trump made the comments while detailing his thoughts in the moments after his right ear was grazed with a bullet while he was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13—he told the magazine he “didn’t think of fear” at the time and has since chosen not to think about how he was “an eighth of an inch from really bad things happening.”
Zuckerberg previously told Bloomberg Trump’s reaction to the shooting was “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” but stopped short of endorsing him.
Zuckerberg has a patchy history with Trump and his allies, largely surrounding Facebook’s content moderation policies, as Republicans have repeatedly alleged the policies are skewed in favor of Democrats. Facebook’s decision to censor COVID-19 misinformation and remove posts about the infamous 2020 New York Post story about a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden have been the subject of numerous GOP-led congressional probes. In recent months, Zuckerberg has made several public statements to align himself with Republicans, even as he’s said he wants to stay “neutral” in the 2024 election. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last month, he claimed the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content,” adding that it was “wrong” the company ceded to the pressure. The Supreme Court, however, ruled this summer that the federal government did not overstep its authority by asking social media companies to remove content it believed was misinformation. Facebook and Instagram also banned Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, leading Trump to sue Meta. The lawsuit is pending despite the restrictions being lifted in July.
Trump accused Zuckerberg of working against him in the 2020 election in his new book and warned he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again. Trump launched the attack in his new coffee table book, “Save America,” released Sept. 3. The book cites the more than $400 million Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to nonprofits dedicated to funding elections operations during the pandemic, money conservatives have falsely claimed was used to help elect President Joe Biden. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote.
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