Donald Trump says Google ‘has to be careful’ or it will be ‘shut down’

Here at The Verge, we’ve been doing our best not to uncritically publish every random statement and half-cocked idea that comes out of former President Donald Trump’s mouth for several years now. He just says stuff, especially about tech, and most of it doesn’t come to anything.

But last week, Trump casually mentioned to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that “Google has to be careful” because “they’ve been very irresponsible” and that he had “a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it.”

In classic Trump fashion, he said this after noting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had called him after the assassination attempt, and “nobody called from Google.” So it’s tempting to put this down as classic transactional Trump rambling — after all, he was calling Facebook “the enemy of the people” as recently as March as he backtracked on banning TikTok. One phone call and “badass” comment, and you’re back in his good graces, it seems.

But scratch the surface even slightly, and there’s a direct line from Trump’s comments about Google to the group of newly unmasked Silicon Valley VCs pumping money into the Trump campaign. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz openly worried about the company’s power while announcing their support for Trump, saying it was “more powerful than probably 95 percent of countries in the world.” Peter Thiel has been funding anti-Google regulatory action for years now, at one point even calling the company “treasonous.”

And Thiel-funded Trump running mate JD Vance has appeared at antitrust conferences praising FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she was “doing a pretty good job” and openly supporting breaking up the big platform companies. “Does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all these other platforms that are built underneath the Google umbrella? You can make the same argument with Instagram, Facebook, other services of Meta,” he said last month at a Y Combinator event in Washington, DC.

So why does Vance feel this way?

Well, because, like almost every conservative, Vance is irritated at how the big platforms moderate content.

“Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” he says. Noting that people might search for President Joe Biden’s fitness for office, he added that “whether Google provides a fundamentally unbiased search result is, I think, at the heart of American democracy.”

In fact, Vance thinks Google’s search results are a bigger threat to democracy than, say, mass deportations or forcing people to give birth. “If the new mode of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it’s a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that’s called a threat to democracy in 2024,” he said.

In what is now classic ham-fisted Vance fashion, he was far more reckless with these ideas in proximity to the safe space of right-wing influencer media, responding to the baseless claim that “Google is rigging the election” by tweeting that breaking up the company is “long overdue” because “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”

It should go without saying that politicians turning to antitrust threats because they’re mad at whatever moderation decisions YouTube makes is an affront to the First Amendment, but it’s all just part of a long line of conservative attempts to directly regulate speech on various platforms, whether through overzealous speech laws, stirring up nonsensical controversy, or just up and buying them, to variable results.

Those attempts recently hit the Supreme Court, which ruled that most content moderation is protected free speech. “When the platforms use their Standards and Guidelines to decide which third-party content those feeds will display, or how the display will be ordered and organized, they are making expressive choices,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion sending Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton back to the lower courts for additional proceedings. “And because that is true, they receive First Amendment protection.”

And in what can be read as a direct refutation of Vance’s ideas, Kagan wrote that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.”

Here’s the unedited transcript of Trump saying Google might be shut down. Keep all of that in mind as you read it.

So Mark Zuckerberg called me, first of all he called me a few times. He called me after the event, and he said that was really amazing, very brave. You know, and he actually announced he’s not going to support a Democrat because he can’t, because he respected me for what I did that day. I think what I did maybe was, to me it was a normal response. But I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the day before or this same subject... and he actually apologized. He said they made a mistake, etc. etc., correcting the mistake.

Google, nobody called from Google.

One of the things like, doing a show like yours. Your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but where you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you’re doing right now with me. And if I do a good job, they’re gonna vote for me, they’re gonna vote for me. Because it’s not just on Fox. Fox... it’s a smaller part of it. You on all over the — those little beautiful cellphones all over the place. You have a product. You have a great product, you have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out to do things like your show, and other shows, and...

Google has been very bad, they’ve been very irresponsible. I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.

Correction, August 5th: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a court case. It is NetChoice v. Paxton, not Moody v. Paxton.