When President-Elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office today, he’ll do so in the shadow of Big Tech. He’ll be flanked in the Capitol rotunda by billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook also in attendance. The President-Elect is reveling in support from tech leaders who have previously chided, banned, and excoriated him. Yet here they stand, each having donated $1 million respectively to the President’s inaugural fund, with the Meta founder even co-hosting a lavish celebration tonight for the President-Elect with high-profile Republican donors.

The question that should be on every American’s mind is ‘why?’

Over the past few presidential administrations, the role of tech leaders in the policy arena has changed dramatically, but never have we seen such fawning: the financial flattery, visits to Mar-a-Lago, and even adjusting platform policy to fit the known “values” of the incoming administration.

“Far more than in early 2017 at the start of his first term, corporate America has largely embraced Mr. Trump during his transition, partly out of a desire to get on his good side, reports The New York Times.

The fact is, Big Tech leaders are intelligent, shrewd monopolists. They know exactly how this President will operate, in favor and in flattery, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to remain in his good graces.

In The Washington Post, Dartmouth College Political Scientist Brendan Nyhan remarked that, “Technology companies are performing their support for an incoming administration to decrease the likelihood they’ll be targeted or persecuted.” To no one’s surprise, the list of ongoing court cases and investigations by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) into Big Tech firms is extensive, with the most recent investigation into Microsoft’s cloud computing announced in November.

Trump will inherit a case his DoJ started, and that Biden’s won, against Google for monopolizing search. Will Trump look to weaken the remedy? And what about the Apple app store monopolization case that Biden’s DoJ launched on the heels of an investigation that Trump’s started? Will the Trump DoJ fold or look to settle it with a scolding? Or what of the FTC’s cases against Amazon and Meta for monopolizing e-commerce and social media, respectively?

When Trump nominated Gail Slater to lead the antitrust division at DoJ, he talked a big game about Big Tech.

“Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”

Yet now, all these companies’ CEOs—Zuckerberg, Pichai, Cook, Microsoft’s Nadella, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy—have bent the knee. And their end game is clear. They want to preserve their monopolies, limit the consequences in ongoing cases, and have investigations quietly dismissed with no more than a slap on the wrist!

Despite President-Elect Trump’s promise to keep up the heat, how can you not be concerned by how fast and how hard tech leaders’ influences have penetrated the incoming administration, and in turn, how the “values” of this administration have infiltrated Big Tech? No other incoming administration has been so openly transactional.

Common Dreams recently created a tracker of corporate donations to the President-Elect’s inaugural fund, and Big Tech isn’t solo in its financial support of today’s affairs. Corporations like Citibank, Ford, Goldman Sachs, and AT&T are also on the list. And they’re not the only ones concerned – last week, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) sent a letter to the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber, pressing them for clarity on their extravagant inaugural fund donations.

“We are concerned that your company and other Big Tech donors are using your massive contributions to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor,” they write.

Presidential administrations serve the public, not Big Tech. As an organization whose mission is to hold these companies accountable, protect consumers, and oppose anti-competitive business practices, we’ll be watching to see if this flattery influences the incoming administration to ease up on Big Tech, and we’ll continue to push for action to fulfill promises of holding them to account.