Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has dubbed Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg a “criminal” and said he would be likely to betray the MAGA movement despite his recent efforts to woo the president-elect.
The War Room podcast host told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on This Week that he saw Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as “supplicants.”
“They’re not there as the oligarchs,” he asserted in an interview that aired Sunday. “We had no power. President Trump was out and, I mean, went out of the political class and the Republican Party, and Fox News turned against him. ‘We’re going to make him a nonperson.’ He was banned from their platforms for, I think, 18 months. But as soon as Zuckerberg said, ‘I’ve been invited, I’m going,’ The floodgates opened up, and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants.
“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.
“When Biden talks about that, they create the oligarchs. They only became oligarchs and they flipped on them. when they had surrendered. And now, now they’re going to come to Trump.”
Bannon went on to make a comparison between the tech billionaires who are set to attend Inauguration Day and the surrender of Japan in front of General Douglas MacArthur in 1945.
He also said he did not believe Zuckerberg, claiming that the Facebook founder was a “criminal” and a figure that the Trump administration could not trust.
Bannon, who was released from prison in October after serving for contempt of Congress, did not provide any evidence that the tech founder committed a crime.
Meta did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Zuckerberg has embarked on a new campaign to woo Donald Trump in recent months by changing content moderation policies on his platforms, abandoning diversity schemes, and visiting the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club to find a resolution to a lawsuit brought by Trump in 2021.
Bannon questioned Zuckerberg’s “non-partisan” funding of various electoral boards in 2020, a line of attack he has taken for several years as he continues to believe the election was stolen.
He called for lawmakers to examine Zuckerberg’s political activities “properly.”
“I want to see that in a systematic adjudication either in the House or, I think, better with a grand jury and a special prosecutor to go through 2020,” he said.
“What I want is the House to do it first. But if they’re not prepared to do it, a special counsel’s set up that looks at the 2020 election and looks at it seriously and adjudicates it. If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there,” Bannon said after he rejected Karl’s suggestion that he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Zuckerberg.
In a warning to the president-elect, Bannon suggested Zuckerberg should be kept at an arm’s length.
“When it’s convenient for him, he will flip,” he said.
