Historical Fascist Parallels: Why Tech's Kiss-the-Ring Dinner with Trump at the White House is Worse Than You Think
Even if you already thought it was gross!
At the White House last night, the country’s most powerful tech executives lined up for photos, pledges, and praise. Oh, the praise. (Elon Musk, it should be be noted, was conspicuously absent.) The optics were unmistakable: elite industry blessing a strongman project. Check out the video below if this is the first time you’re hearing about this:
In the history of authoritarianism, events like this aren’t sideshows—they’re more like Act I. The performance signals a bargain—especially in the case of President Trump, who has predicated his brand on such “deals”—regulatory indulgence and public money in exchange for loyalty, legitimacy, and technical muscle.
It rarely ends at dinner. Authoritarianism thrives on these public gestures of deference because they make support look safe. Markets see stability, media sees inevitability, and middle managers see where their loyalties ought to lie. What appears to be dinner theater is in fact the opening of a channel through which subsidies and contracts will flow, accompanied by steadily escalating demands for ideological alignment.
Historical Precedents for Trump’s Tech White House Dinner
There’s history to this gesture. On February 20, 1933, Adolf Hitler met with Germany’s leading industrialists at Hermann Göring’s residence for the so-called “Secret Meeting of 20 February 1933.” In it, funds were raised to secure the election that would pave the way for the Enabling Act, the law that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. German industry understood the bargain: favorable conditions and protection from labor unrest in exchange for money and compliance. Within months, strikes were banned, unions dismantled, and businesses folded into a war economy.
Benito Mussolini made similar overtures with his Carta del Lavoro (Charter of Labor) in 1927, declaring a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. It sounded like harmony—labor and industry working together for the nation—but in practice it (too) abolished strikes and made independent unions illegal. Soon after, Italy’s government created the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), a holding company that bound banks and industries into a corporatist state structure. Subsidies flowed, but the price was alignment. Business leaders didn’t have to wear party uniforms, but they were expected to act as if they had.
The dinner last night is obviously different in scale and stakes, but the structure certainly shares a whiff, and these echoes matter because they help us see where this kind of political theater tends to go. In Spain, Franco’s regime perfected the “vertical syndicate” through the Syndicalist Organization, a corporatist arrangement where workers and employers were bound into state-controlled bodies that left no room for dissent. In Germany, industrialists like Krupp became indispensable to the regime’s war machine, profiting from forced labor while aligning their fortunes with Hitler’s survival.
The common thread is that what begins as a flattering dinner progresses into capture, often swiftly. It starts with normalization: powerful people smiling alongside a leader whose politics many once considered toxic (perhaps most famously including Zuckerberg). It’s about reassurance: if the most prestigious firms are willing to play along, then everyone else can relax. If you’re interested in this subject, I can’t recommend Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation strongly enough—it’s more relevant today than it was almost a decade ago:
Then comes patronage. Governments offer subsidies and protection, whether in the form of tax breaks for factories, land and energy for data centers, or preferential treatment in contracts. At first it looks like industrial policy. Soon it hardens into dependence. And given the ongoing concerns about AI’s role in displacing human labor through automation, to say nothing of extractive industry and intensifying surveillance, this AI-themed tech dinner should absolutely set off alarm bells.
What to Watch Out For
Once dependence is established, conditions creep in. Procurement is an especially potent instrument. In Italy it was labor courts that stripped workers of the right to strike; in Germany it was orders that demanded industrialists produce for the war machine. In the United States today, it might be framed as “ideological neutrality” requirements for AI systems or content moderation policies tied to government contracts. The language sounds bland—that’s the point—but the effect is to chill dissent. You don’t need censors if you can dictate conditions through procurement.
Labor is often the next front. Fascist regimes were relentless in dismantling independent unions, not only to weaken opposition but to reassure industrial allies that strikes would not disrupt production. Franco’s syndicates, Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro, Hitler’s crushing of the trade unions—each was a signal that the regime would guarantee order in the workplace. The modern echo is subtler but familiar: data-center workers and logistics staff facing union-busting campaigns, legal frameworks tilted against organizing, executives reassured that “efficiency” will be preserved.
Next up is security integration. Authoritarian states rarely resist the temptation to lure business into surveillance and control. In Nazi Germany that meant industrial mobilization and the use of forced labor. In Mussolini’s Italy it meant industrial conglomerates subordinated to the autarkic project. In the present, the watchword is data. Partnerships on artificial intelligence, policing, immigration enforcement, and intelligence become channels for binding private firms to state priorities. Contracts that look like ordinary procurement become levers of political loyalty.
Once solidified, punishment and reward quickly sharpen. Compliant firms receive healthy contracts and regulatory indulgence; recalcitrant ones find themselves harassed, audited, or frozen out. The effect is self-reinforcing: loyalty pays, dissent costs. In time, advisory councils and boards become stocked with executives who have demonstrated their willingness to play along, while skeptics are quietly sidelined. The German term Gleichschaltung—synchronization—captures the effect: institutions fall into line not because they are forced one by one, but because they see which way the current is running.
What begins as ring-kissing ends with rule-writing. Tech executives may think they are merely flattering a president in exchange for favorable treatment. But history shows that the dynamic evolves. Once the state has the leverage of subsidies and contracts, it begins to dictate terms. And once executives have signaled their willingness to comply, it becomes ever harder to draw the line. These executives might imagine themselves being able to maintain their ethical positions, but this becomes much harder in practice as incentives (or disincentives) for doing so in the face of this “death by a thousand cuts.”
Last night’s dinner was framed around “American AI dominance,” with executives pledging investments and the administration promising to clear regulatory and infrastructure hurdles. The optics were not of adversarial bargaining but of capitulation—exactly the image Mussolini liked to project in his corporate state. The very vagueness of the commitments, the pledges of loyalty to national goals, is the point. The specifics can come later, once the bargain has settled in as common sense.
Under this view, the dinner was less a cringey photo opp than a watershed moment. It demonstrated that the most powerful sector of the American economy is willing to lend legitimacy to an openly illiberal project, so long as subsidies and favorable policies flow in return. It demonstrated to mid-level executives, investors, and engineers that alignment with political power is the safe choice. And it gave the regime a platform to suggest that tech’s immense cultural and infrastructural power is now aligned with the state.
The best futurists are avid historians, and (relatively recent) history is unambiguous about what such displays might mean for us. Industrial elites have rarely stood against authoritarian drift; more often, they have rationalized their participation as pragmatism, until it was too late. When tech leaders kiss the ring like this, they are not merely flattering an imminently flatterable president; they are rehearsing the role that industry has played before in the consolidation of authoritarian power: not its victim, but its trusty partner.
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And here’s an episode of the Urgent Futures Podcast that relates to the above. If you like what you see/hear, I hope you’ll consider to subscribing to the show on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.