March 8, 2016
In a secret meeting far from the prying eyes of the press and public, some of the most powerful leaders of Silicon Valley talked about the same thing that consumes the rest of America — the Donald Trump phenomenon.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, and Napster creator Sean Parker all attended the annual American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, along with a host of other business and political leaders.
Although the Huffington Post reported that Trump was the “main topic” of conversation, noting that strategist Karl Rove gave a presentation on how the Republican front-runner can be stopped, the fact that the meeting was in secret left most details hidden.
In part of its report, The Huffington Post quoted sources “familiar with the meeting” as saying that much of the conversation around Trump centered on “how this happened, rather than how are we going to stop him.”
However, conservative commentator Bill Kristol put the discussion in a different perspective
“A specter was haunting the World Forum–the specter of Donald Trump,” Kristol wrote in an emailed report. “There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he’s done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated.”
“The key task now, to once again paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him,”Kristol wrote. “In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing, brow-furrowing, and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president.”
As the elite mull their next step, the fact that they are even doing so shows the spilt in America, wroteMatthew Geiger on Communities Digital News.
“Donald Trump’s popularity is the product of a political system that has failed to recognize and address the interests of the American people. Instead of addressing their deficits and showing a capacity to learn, those in the industry of politics have simply lashed out against Trump,” Geiger wrote.
“Second, it demonstrates to the political elite the limits of their influence. In order to shape public policies to reflect their special interests going forward, they must become far more strategic. Thus far, the political world has decided to take a stand against change in a ‘him-or-us’ showdown,” he wrote.
