Trump Threatens to Jail Mark Zuckerberg for Life
Donald Trump wrote a book, and true to form, it contains some deeply unbalanced textual musings.
According to Politico, the coffee-table book — titled Saving America — accuses Mark Zuckerberg of plotting to usurp the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden, and warns that the Meta CEO will “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he crosses Trump again.
The book, which will be released next week, features a photo of Zuckerberg and Trump during an undated meeting in the White House. According to Politico, in the caption under the photo Trump claims that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.”
“We are watching him closely,” Trump adds, “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.”
The former president is referring to a conspiracy theory spread in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had used a $350 million investment in the Center for Tech and Civic Life — a Chicago-based nonprofit helping provide election administration resources to thousands of precincts during the Covid-19 pandemic — to help rig the election against him.
In a June 2021 interview with Fox Business, Trump falsely claimed that he “won the election,” that Democrats “cheated,” and that “Facebook and [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg, with the $500 million worth of phony lockboxes that he put on, some of them had 96 percent Biden votes in them — 96 percent!”
The claim was bogus then, and it’s bogus today — but almost four years after the fact Trump is still using it to sow doubt about the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg himself has been attempting to placate angry Republicans who have targeted Meta and its companies over their content moderation policies in a series of Congressional investigations.
Earlier this week, the Facebook founder wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee — one of the most powerful committees in Congress that is currently controlled by Trumpist Republicans — in which he blamed the Biden administration for Covid-era social media policies restricting the spread of misinformation related to the virus, and expressed regret for the company’s role in the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 election,” he added. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
While Zuckerburg can grovel for the forgiveness of House Republicans, it clearly won’t stop Trump from continuing to use him as a scapegoat in his election conspiracies — especially if he once again loses in November.
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