Steve Bannon mocks Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos

Steve Bannon has intensified the MAGA civil war by comparing the sudden support for Donald Trump from tech titans Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Trump’s one-time White House chief strategist fired his latest broadside against Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk in an interview with ABC News the weekend before his former boss is sworn in for a second term. The two have crossed swords in recent weeks on the subject of H-1B visas, which are used to attract highly skilled foreign workers. Musk, who spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected and is now seen as almost inseparable from the president-elect, supports them; Bannon, and other longtime anti-immigration Trump faithful, fiercely oppose them.

Bannon told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that the decision of Musk, Meta CEO Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Bezos to attend Monday’s inauguration made them “supplicants.”

He invoked US General Douglas MacArthur receiving Imperial Japan’s unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945 to paint a picture of the tech titans bending the knee to Trump.

And he mocked Zuckerberg’s decision to back away from Facebook’s former policy on fact-checking, something that has become a bone of contention in Trump circles because of the freewheeling attitude to facts of the president-elect and his supporters.

“As soon as Zuckerberg said, I’m invited, I’m going — the floodgates opened up and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants,” Bannon said. “So I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them. And they surrendered. They came and said — oh, we’ll take off any constraints, there’ll be no more checking.”

He added: “I view this as September of 1945 — the Missouri — and you have the Imperial High Command ... and he (Trump) is like Douglas MacArthur.

“That is an official surrender, OK? And I think it’s powerful.”

Earlier this month Bannon called for a “100 per cent moratorium” on all immigration, while upping the rhetoric against Musk, suggesting he would “rip your face off” unless he stopped pushing for more visas. He said: “We love converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalise the faith.” Bannon told Musk not to “come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be. If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”

Bezos has faced backlash for pulling an endorsement of Kamala Harris from the Washington Post, which he owns, before the election. Other staff have left the paper since the election, including a cartoonist whose drawing of Bezos and others kneeling in front of Trump was pulled. The paper insisted that it was not censoring the cartoon and said it was repeating points made in a column on the subject. The hostilities represent a growing schism within MAGA ranks that Trump will need to navigate carefully.

Musk — and fellow tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — have been put in charge of a government advisory agency called DOGE which aims to cut billions from federal spending. The Tesla boss has already flexed his new political muscles when a deal to avert a government shutdown fell apart at his urging last month. Bannon, while no longer a key figure in the Trump set-up, is seen as representing the views of many of the incoming president’s most loyal supporters.