Apple CEO Tim Cook Has Learned the Rules for Getting Ahead in Trump’s America

If you want to understand the silly little scene that played out between Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday, you might start by remembering something that Vice President J.D. Vance said two years ago.

While attending a conference for nationalist conservatives, Vance offered an astonishing view of politics. The “idea that there is this extremely strong division between the public sector and the private sector” was flawed, Vance argued. In reality, he went on to say, “there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together.”

That’s a useful framework for understanding much of what has happened since Trump (with Vance at his side) returned to the White House in January. That includes various trade policies and tariffs, of course, but also the “golden share” in U.S. Steel that Trump secured for himself, and how the administration leveraged its regulatory authority to force Paramount to pay a huge settlement. In each case, the Trump administration has tried to erase (or has ignored) the distinction between the public and the private sectors, just as Vance said.

Trump takes a further step. To him, not only is the private public, but the public is also very personal. He sees himself as the CEO of the department store that is the United States of America—a metaphor that, notably, does not make any distinction between the government and the rest of the country. He’ll decide what deals are in everyone’s best interest, no matter what consenting individuals engaged in peaceful, private commerce might want to do. If he’s unhappy about something in Brazil, it will be your problem. And if he’s pleased with gifts and tributes, then all is well.

Do you run a foreign company trying to make a huge investment in American steel manufacturing? You’d better be prepared to cut Trump a piece of the action. Are you unhappy about Medicaid cuts that reduce the reimbursements your company receives from the government? That’s nothing a $5 million donation and dinner at Mar-a-Lago can’t fix. There’s a good reason why lobbying firms with direct access to the White House are reportedly keeping very, very busy these days.

And that’s why Cook found himself in the Oval Office this week, presenting Trump with a special gift from Apple: A gold and glass token of the company’s appreciation for Trump’s special attention.

Shortly afterwards, Trump responded in kind. Apple is now exempt from the 100 percent tariff that Trump is imposing on high-end computer chips made in other countries. Officially, that exemption is because Apple is investing $100 billion in U.S. manufacturing. Unofficially, it sure looks like Cook’s gift paid off.

It certainly did for Apple’s shareholders. Apple’s stock climbed 5 percent on Wednesday and another 3 percent on Thursday.

The phrase “central planning” gets tossed around as a shorthand to describe Trump’s trade policies, but it’s not quite accurate. That phrase conjures images of bureaucrats armed with charts and committees drawing up regulations. There is very little of that in Trump’s world. Those who can afford to make a direct appeal to the president might get a tariff exemption. Everyone else is screwed. In effect, Trump has turned the administrative state into his private machine. As Harvard economist Larry Summers has recently noted, this looks more like Peronism, the nationalist ideology that ruined Argentina for generations, than it does like typical American central planning.

Cook has grokked the new rules, and he surely won’t be the last one to apply the lesson. He oversees a company that buys and sells products that crisscross America’s borders, and the way to ensure those transactions occur as smoothly as possible is to stay in Trump’s good graces. If that means humiliating yourself on television in the Oval Office, then that’s what you do.

The gift itself is actually a stroke of brilliance, when viewed through this lens. It is a tangible reminder to Trump of how much Apple’s CEO loves him. The president is old and temperamental, but every time he gazes at that shiny monument to cronyism, he’ll remember that Apple deserves a special place in the department store of his mind.

It is easy to roll your eyes at this—and perhaps that’s especially true for libertarians, who are well aware that corruption, rent-seeking, and influence-peddling are inevitable in any political system. Trump is certainly not the first president to be successfully swayed by a well-timed meeting or gift. One might even feel compelled to defend such a nakedly obvious quid pro quo: Isn’t it better for Cook to do his little dance for Trump in front of the TV cameras than in a proverbial smoke-filled room?

Two problems with that.

First, it’s just gross. As Reason‘s Matt Welch put it last week, there seem to be three basic explanations for why Republicans have ignored Trump’s open grift and self-dealing: “Either they just don’t see the problem, or it’s the price for participating in a two-party system where this particular politician is enduringly potent, or they never really meant that stuff about virtue anyway,” he wrote. “We will not soon get better politicians by shrugging at the corruptions on our team, or even grudgingly accepting that it’s all a dirty business, so whaddya gonna do?”

Second, go back to what Vance said two years ago. Some observers have tried to defend Vance’s comments by arguing that he was speaking descriptively about the nature of politics during the Biden administration rather than being prescriptive about how things ought to work. As Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has pointed out, the context of his remarks makes it clear that’s not the case.

Within the worldview that posits no distinction between private and public, it’s neither shameful nor unusual for the president to exert control over a significant share of U.S. Steel or accept gifts from Apple in exchange for special favors. Instead, that’s simply how things work. If there is no distinction between a public realm and a private realm, then there are effectively no (or very few) limits on the president’s power to intervene in private economic affairs.

The whole thing calls to mind then-President Barack Obama’s claim during the 2012 campaign that private sector success was built atop government infrastructure. “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” Obama said. “Somebody else made that happen.”

At the time, Republicans howled. Trump could probably use that same line in a rally today and earn cheers for it.

In short: If Obama’s theory of the relationship between the public and private sectors could be boiled down to “you didn’t build that,” then one might say that Trump’s is “you can’t build that—unless there’s something in it for me.”

It hasn’t taken some executives very long to figure out how to play that game. The bigger and showier the bribe, the better. Pay your tributes in front of the TV cameras, rather than in the back rooms. Special treatment is available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, and the White House is open for business.

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