Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

It’s difficult to imagine human beings less similar in temperament than Donald Trump and most of the executives who run big tech companies. But the tech industry, like any business, is transactional by definition, and Trump might be the most nakedly transactional public figure of the century. In the president’s second term, that shared trait has given us too many weird and discomforting moments to count, from Apple, Google, and Microsoft funding the new White House ballroom to the U.S. government taking a 9.9% stake in Intel.

In both January 2025 and January 2026, I wrote newsletters arguing that the executives contorting themselves to be the president’s buddy were merely postponing the day when they’d have to confront some controversy too consequential to ignore. Since then, Trump has dialed his racism, corruption, and generally strange behavior way past 11, and no great reckoning has come. So I’m not going to predict that Tuesday’s history-making midterm election results will spark radical change in the tech industry’s desire to butter up to the president, whose term is not yet half over.

S. Senate and House of Representatives has gigantic implications for how the industry looks after its interests in Washington. Republicans have been so steadfast in their support of the president that in some ways engaging with the federal government really has boiled down to engaging with Trump. That mostly requires flattering him or otherwise doing things he believes make him look good.

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