While campaigning in August, Donald Trump‘s VP pick, then-Senator JD Vance (R-OH), told Face the Nation that big tech needs to be broken up.
As the new U.S. Vice President, Vance returned Sunday to Face the Nation where host Margaret Brennan reminded him of his comment and asked if his opinion has changed after Big Tech CEOs — Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — each donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and had prime seats at the event with fellow CEO Elon Musk.
As seen and heard in the clip below, Brennan reminded Vance: “In August you told us Google and Facebook are too big. We ought to take the Teddy Roosevelt approach — break ’em up, don’t let them control what people are allowed to say.” She asked, “Are you still going to break up Big Tech?”
Vance replied: “So, you know who else was at the inauguration was my mom and a lot of people who just supported the president.”
Brennan interrupted and said “they each donated a million dollars to the inauguration and had pretty good seating,” to which Vance replied, “They didn’t have as good of seating as my mom.”
(Note: The CEOs sat in front of Trump’s cabinet nominees including Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel — but behind Vance’s mother, as seen below in red.)
BRENNAN: In August, you told us big tech needs to be broken up. They have now donated to the Trump inauguration. Are you still gonna break 'em up?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2025
VANCE: You know who else was at the inauguration was my mom
B: They gave $1m each to the inauguration
V: There were a lot of… pic.twitter.com/fPuWTzS72e
[Note: In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance wrote about his childhood with his mother, Beverly Aikins, and her devastating drug addiction. During the Trump/Vance campaign in 2024, Aikins invited a New York Times journalist to join her for one of her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.]
Vance did eventually answer Brennan’s question: “We believe fundamentally that Big Tech does have too much power… they can either respect Americans’ constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don’t you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them.”
When Brennan asked: “So they’re still on notice?” Vance replied, “They’re very much on notice.”
Below is the entire 20-minute interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
.jpg){kind=link}