Is Bill Gates changing, or is it a ruse? My money’s on “ruse.”
For years, Gates has been a major funder of, and spokesman for, leftwing causes that are opposed by conservatives and Trump supporters. Now, he may or may not be moving to the center.
He’s not the only one making that shift, sincerely or insincerely.
In the middle of 2024, as it became clear that Donald Trump might regain the presidency, a number of business leaders in high-technology began to reassess their positions in relation to the former president. After he won another term, their reassessment became a full-fledged grovel. From donating money for the Inauguration festivities to heaping praise on their former foe, they curried favor with the once and future president.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. In 2020, his company Meta (Facebook) worked with the Biden administration to violate the free-speech rights of Trump and his supporters, and, in what became known as the “Zuckerbucks” scandal, he donated nearly $400 million to manipulate election procedures to hurt Trump. Less than four years later, after Trump responded to being shot by raising his fist and saying, “Fight, fight, fight,” Zuckerberg called Trump’s action “one of the most bada** things I’ve ever seen.” Post-election, Zuckerberg’s company donated seven figures to the Inauguration and settled for $25 million over banning Trump on Facebook. Last January, Zuckerberg praised the Trump administration as one that “prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad.” He’s said recently that he wants to stay out of “partisan politics.”
Then there’s Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos’s paper targeted Donald Trump with nutty conspiracy theories for years, but Bezos blocked his editors from endorsing Kamala Harris and, in December, said he was “very optimistic this time around,” and that, if Trump pursued deregulation, “I’m going to help him.” The Post’s editorial cartoonist resigned after the rejection of one of her cartoons, one showing four billionaires including Bezos putting bags of cash at the feet of a Trump figure.
After the election, Bill Gates and his aide Larry Cohen had dinner with the President-elect and incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Gates later called the discussion “wide ranging,” largely about public health matters such the Gates Foundation’s efforts against polio. “I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up,” he said, and “We both got, I think, pretty excited” over the prospect of an HIV vaccine.
Trump has always been transactional, willing to forgive (though not necessarily forget) if doing so is to his and the country’s benefit. He’s happy to accept their new support. Last May, Trump said of “these Internet people” that “they all hated me in my first term, and now they’re kissing my a**.”
This past September there was a White House gathering attended by more than two dozen technology industry leaders, including Gates. Kari Lake, a longtime Trump ally who is senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said of some attendees, “we look at and view as the scum of the earth: Zuckerberg, what he did in that election and taking away President Trump’s voice on Facebook, and Bill Gates. I mean, we could go all day about all the crazy things he’s been involved in. But these guys are all former enemies where they treated Trump like an enemy. And now they’re sitting there capitulating, bending the knee to Trump. . . I laughed when I saw it.”
Lake told Newsmax that Big Tech leaders getting together with Trump could ease tensions between the two sides. “These guys are pretty powerful. They’re there to bend the knee, and do we really want them still aiming, you know, aiming toward you and trying to bring you down? I don’t think I want to have Google continuing to try to bring Trump down. I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg to try to bring Trump down for four more years.
“I’d much rather see Trump bring people together,” Lake said. “He was sitting there with a smile on his face, and they were the ones who had to crawl back in and capitulate to the victor.”
The tech sector needs help, or wants to avoid government hostility, on a wide range of issues, including regulation (or lack thereof) in the field of Artificial Intelligence, protection from EU and UK attacks on online free speech, the issuance of visas for technology experts, and the rapid growth of data centers and the need for power to run them. Importantly, the issue of power for data centers has created divisions between the Information Technology industry and its longtime friends among environmentalist activists.
The President needs a friendly tech sector, one that would work with him to deal with technological threats from China and help him create prosperity out of the unimaginable advances we’re seeing in computing.
But, as is usually the case with President Trump and his frenemies, there is a stick as well as a carrot.
Trump’s Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are currently pursuing antitrust lawsuits against large tech companies including Apple and Google. Pressure on Silicon Valley and high-tech is coming from Trump appointees such as FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, FTC Commissioner Mark Meador, and Gail Slater, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division.
Some conservatives want to keep up the pressure. As reported by David Zimmerman in the Washington Examiner, “A broad coalition of bipartisan groups, which includes some conservative allies, is demanding President Donald Trump follow through on his campaign promise to crack down on alleged monopolists in landmark antitrust cases.” The groups pointed to Trump’s antitrust enforcement campaign during his first term, and urged him to remain committed to the “America First Antitrust” vision.
As a tech industry icon once designated “Master of the Universe” on the cover of Time, Gates is still at the center of things. Although he resigned as Microsoft’s board chairman in 2014 and resigned from the board entirely in 2020, he was included in the White House gathering of tech CEOs – indeed, he was seated next to the First Lady.
At the gathering, Gates thanked President Trump for his “incredible leadership” and for “setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing, advanced manufacturing here.” He said that the tie between his business career and his philanthropy career “is innovation – innovating in health, in areas like vaccines or gene editing, and the President and I are talking about taking American innovation to the next level to cure, and even eradicate, some of these diseases.”
He added: “The work being done by the people at this table is changing the world. You know, it’s coming fast, so it’s great we all get together and talk about how the U.S. can lead in this key area, and apply it even to the poorest outside the U.S. as well as our great citizens.”
The conciliatory language is part of Gates’s peacemaking with longtime political and ideological foes. The Gates Foundation is said to have severed ties with Arabella Advisors, which has received over $450 million from Gates over the years. With a reported 425 employees, Arabella is the hub of a vast network of Democratic and leftwing groups, and Gates’s cutoff was, according to The New York Times, “a symbolically significant blow to a powerful player in liberal politics.”
And Gates has now backed off his claims that manmade global warming or “climate change” poses an existential threat to the human race and the planet. He still asserts that “climate change” is at least partly the result of human activity, but acknowledges that fears of catastrophe have been exaggerated.
So why not bring Gates into the fold, or at least neutralize him? Why shouldn’t Trump supporters and conservatives follow Don Corleone’s advice to “hold your friends close and your enemies closer”?
Because one makes peace with Bill Gates at one’s peril. That’s especially true given the wide gap between Gates, with his baggage, and TrumpWorld.
Tim Schwab, a liberal journalist and sharp critic of Gates, wrote in January that, “among Trump’s right-wing political base, Gates is one of the most reviled public figures on Earth. And Trump is filling out his administration with overt critics of the Gates Foundation, like RFK Jr. All of this puts Gates in the hot seat for the next four years. I would not be surprised to see the Gates Foundation facing some kind of federal investigation in the near future. At the very least, the foundation will lose some measure of political and financial support from the US government.
“But we also shouldn’t underestimate Bill Gates. If his life story tells us anything, it is how committed he is to an ends-justifies-the-means, self-serving pragmatism – bending over and greasing up in order to advance his personal interests, his personal reputation and his empire of influence. The fact that he was able to secure three hours of face time with the most powerful person in the world demonstrates the political influence Gates wields – and also Trump’s craven fidelity to the billionaire class.
“Gates’s recent, glowing comments about Trump are almost certainly just the beginning of the courtship. We should also expect the Gates Foundation to make structural changes in the weeks or months ahead, compromising its publicly declared values and mission to align with Trump’s political agenda.”
Schwab noted Gates’s considerable investments in technology that will supposedly reduce climate change, including half the $4 billion cost of a nuclear plant in Wyoming, as well as Microsoft’s billions in federal government contracts. In addition, “Many of the Gates Foundation’s biggest charitable projects – the ones Bill Gates has built his personal philanthropic legacy on – are largely funded by us, taxpayers.”
The bottom line, Schwab wrote, “is that Gates is highly financially incentivized, in a self-interested way, to win over Trump. And flattery appears to part of Trump’s ‘art of the deal.’ Does this explain why Gates is now spinning preposterous narratives about what an ‘energized’ and ‘fascinated’ leader Trump is, committed to ‘driving innovation’ and advancing the public health of poor nations? . . . While Gates wants to win Trump’s favor, what does he have to offer? A lot, as it turns out. For more than two decades, Gates has used philanthropic donations to build an army of allies – advocacy groups, think tanks, universities and news rooms – all of which, on some fundamental level, serve at the pleasure of Bill Gates.”
Gates, it appears, has an amazing ability to bring people together from across the ideological divide – together in distrusting him.
Regarding the White House tech event, conservative media personality Mike Cernovich wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “There is no reason for Bill Gates to be in the White House.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) wrote, “For the record I’m not going to ever eat Bill Gates fake meat, bugs, take the never ending vaccines, or gene editing. And I still haven’t forgotten about Zuck bucks.”
Also on X, conservative commentator Robby Starbuck wrote: “It’s infuriating to see Bill Gates at the White House in a position of honor. I want a future where we stop giving power to evil people like Gates. He’s a globalist who hates the America First ideology. His God complex deserves nothing but contempt.”
User @realpeteyb123, a prominent Trump supporter on X, complained about Gates’s involvement, noting that “I’m not a fan of Bill Gates at all, like most of you aren’t” – “you” referring to some 277,000 followers.
@WallStreetMav, with 1.6 million followers, compared Gates and Zuckerberg to Elon Musk. (Musk was not at the dinner, which was held during his and Trump’s falling-out.) “It was Elon who risked his entire business, his reputation and hundreds of millions of $$$ in swing states to help get President Trump elected in 2024. If President Trump needs tech advisors, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg should not be anywhere near the White House. They both fund radical left wing groups opposed to MAGA and Trump’s policies.”
The pro-Trump @WallStreetApes account, which has a million followers, commented: “Something has gone VERY wrong, tonight at the White House dinner. On the left: sitting next to Trump is Bill Gates. On the Right: Sitting next to Trump is Mark Zuckerberg. Bring back Elon Musk and Donald Trump unity.” (Three weeks after the tech dinner, at the September 25 memorial event for Charlie Kirk, Trump and Musk appeared to have reconciled to some extent.)
Gates’s recent favorable words about Trump seem utterly insincere. His real attitude comes through. Consider the U.S. Agency for International Development, infamous as a slush fund for well-connected NGOs and for regimes that keep their people poor. At a time when the federal government is spending $81,000 a year per family of four – a level that’s unsustainable – Gates could provide constructive criticism, give useful advice on reforming USAID, and work to raise private funds for whatever USAID-funded programs might be worthy of support.
In May, Gates accused Elon Musk of being “involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children” by putting USAID “in the wood chipper.” The DOGE cuts, he said, were “stunning” and he called the DOGE team “geographically illiterate” after it momentarily confused Gaza Province in Mozambique with Gaza on the Mediterranean. After Elon Musk criticized the sexual abuse of girls by “grooming gangs” in the U.K. and supported free speech and anti-globalism groups in Europe, Gates accused Musk of “insane s***” and of “populist stirring.”
Why should conservatives think Gates is open to their ideas and concerns? His big issues, irreconcilable with conservatism, include late-term and taxpayer-funded abortion, population control, centralized control of education, and other policies rooted in the supposed wisdom of extremely wealthy activists and the non-governmental organizations they finance.
His political background, going back generations, is a mix of influences from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, from the leftwing that dominates the urban part of the Pacific Northwest, and from the nearly extinct Rockefeller/country club wing of the Republican Party. His father’s #1 issue over the years has been promoting higher taxes. His friend and ally in philanthropy is Warren Buffett, who rejected the libertarianism of his politician father (presidential campaign manager for “Mr. Conservative” Senator Robert Taft) to become a doctrinaire liberal Democrat.
Gates’s influences are a political and ideological cocktail suggestive of the strongest opposition to President Trump and his supporters.
In their attitudes about politics and culture, Gates and Trump are clearly opposite.
Trump is anti‑establishment to his core. He distrusts wealthy technocrats like Gates who favor global institutions. Trump is a populist, while Gates backs policies that reflect the values and interests of privileged elites. Gates and his foundation have funded causes and organizations aligned with internationalists, Democrats, and so-called Progressives, in opposition to almost every item that’s currently at the top of Trump’s agenda.
Gates, over the course of decades, has been the public face and the most influential member of the tech establishment – oligarchs who, in 2020, censored Trump and his supporters and covered up the pandemic’s origin and the evidence of corruption that was on the infamous Biden laptop. To this day, Gates is a strong advocate for censorship in the name of “content moderation.”
The differences between Trump and Gates can’t be negotiated away because they extend down to the core of each man’s personality. Trump grew up around construction projects and, despite being born to wealth, identifies with the people who work on those projects. He’s a man of Queens, looked down upon by Manhattanites. Elites, who consider themselves intellectually and morally superior to others because of their money and their social and family connections, consider Trump their inferior; Gates is one of those people.
The media elite who despise Trump treat Gates as a darling. Gates is interviewed as if he were a genius on science and public policy, and the media almost completely ignore his ethical problems such as his “MeToo”-type problems and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – matters that pushed him out of Microsoft and helped break up his marriage. While Trump has put his name and reputation on the line, submitting himself to voters in primaries and general elections over the course of a decade – at the risk of his fortune, his freedom, and his life – Gates has been a master manipulator, using his money and that of his nonprofit organizations to wield influence with politicians and bureaucrats mostly out of the public eye.
Trump, as president, is a master of finding common ground between longtime enemies. (See, for example, the Arab states and Israel.) Perhaps he and Gates can stay out of each other’s way, or even find projects on which they can work together, such as the eradication of HIV.
But be careful. “Trust but verify” was the Russian proverb that President Reagan followed in dealing with the Soviets – be watchful, with measurable goals, and require that your counterpart earn your trust at each stage. No less stringent a standard applies to Bill Gates.
Dr. Steven J. Allen is a NLPC Senior Fellow.
