Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg had met just once before the dinner, an Oval Office encounter last September. Afterward, the president boasted about his giant following on the platform. But October was a hot political month at Facebook: Mr. Zuckerberg was in an open battle with a leading Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was threatening to break up Facebook and whom he called “an existential threat” to the company. The morning of their dinner, a top British official demanded answers on why Facebook would tolerate false political advertising.
Mr. Zuckerberg, a Facebook executive said, seems to view Mr. Trump as a peer. By contrast, he told amused top aides at one of his regular Monday meetings in March that Mr. Kushner was calling him so often about help with the administration’s coronavirus response that he couldn’t keep up, two people familiar with the meeting said. (“Mark does not think of himself as a peer to this president or any president,” a Facebook spokesman, Tucker Bounds, said, adding that Mr. Zuckerberg had initiated the conversation with Mr. Kushner about the coronavirus response.)
Mr. Zuckerberg has played the high-stakes and unpredictable politics of the Trump years as well as any other corporate executive. And a week before the dinner last October, he made clear in a speech that his interests and the president’s aligned: Mr. Zuckerberg would reject a growing movement to limit the false or inflammatory statements of the American president.