TOI Correspondent from Washington: Amid conjecture that big-tech CEOs and billionaires are folding before his hints of retribution after seeing the “writing on the wall” in the Presidential elections, MAGA supremo Donald Trump is claiming that Google CEO Sundar Pichai called him to compliment him on his visit to McDonald’s.
“I actually got a call from Sundar…the head of Google and he said, sir, I just want to tell you what you did with McDonald’s was one of the single biggest events we’ve ever had at Google,” Trump claimed at a rally in Pennsylvania, repeating an assertion he made a few hours before on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Trump has previously claimed such supplicatory calls from Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook/META’s Mark Zuckerberg. As with Pichai, they too have refrained from confirming or denying the calls, likely so as to not offend the tetchy former President.
Claiming calls and conversations from prominent figures, including foreign leaders, has long been a Trump practice. Some critics see them as fictional or hyperbolic or an inaccurate or self-aggrandizing rendering of the exchanges.
Trump frequently relates how he warned France’s President Emmanuel Macron that would impose retaliatory tariffs on French wines and champagne if France did the same to American automobile industry, forcing him to back down. He also claims to have warned a Taliban leader, whom he refers to only by the first name “Abdul,” that he would bomb his house if US troops in Afghanistan are attacked.
He once claimed, in a White House meeting with then Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked him to mediate on the Kashmir issue, forcing New Delhi to refute the claim. Such an invitation would be a departure from New Delhi’s long-standing position that it is a bilateral matter, a stand successive US administrations have embraced.
Typically, foreign leaders and business honchos who Trump claims made conciliatory calls, do not confirm the conversation — likely so as to not offend him. But Trump’s MAGA acolytes see these uncontested claims as proof of Trump’s impending victory.
“They’re either all trying to keep up with Elon Musk or they’re trying to get ahead of something they see coming,” Charlie Kirk, a prominent Trump supporter and MAGA talking head, said. Another Trump supporter noted that “when Fortune 500 CEOs start aligning towards the end of the election cycle, that should give everyone some indication of what’s coming..these people have more skin in the game and know better to align early.”