Former president Donald Trump threatened in an interview today that, if elected president, he would “do something” about Google but stopped short of specifically saying he would break up the company.
In the interview, Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait mentioned the US Justice Department’s proposal to possibly break up Google and asked Trump if Google should be broken up. Trump initially didn’t address Google at all, instead seemingly zeroing in on the Justice Department part of that question to rant about a recent DOJ lawsuit against Virginia election officials.
But after Micklethwait got Trump back on course (“the question is about Google, President Trump”), Trump expressed his unhappiness with how “bad stories” seem to surface more on Google and how he called the “head” of Google to express his frustration:
Yeah, look, Google’s got a lot of power. They’re very bad to me. Very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories… in other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories, and everyone’s entitled to that, you’ll only see the 20 bad stories. I called the head of Google the other day and I said, “I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google.” I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google’s rigged just like our government’s rigged all over the place.
Presumably, Trump is referring to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai here. Google wouldn’t confirm to The Verge if Trump had actually called Pichai.
Micklethwait then asked, “so you would break them up, in other words?” And that’s where Trump said he’d “do something” to Google before starting to pivot into a conversation about China:
I’d do something. But you have to have… look, I give them a lot of credit. They’ve become such a power. Such a power. And you’ve got to give them credit for that. How they became a power is really the discussion. At the same time, it’s a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies. We don’t want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google. China is a very powerful, very smart group of people, I will tell you that from personal experi–
Micklethwait then asked Trump if he would force ByteDance to sell TikTok. Trump demurred with a confusing discussion about the attempted TikTok ban from his administration. Micklethwait followed up to ask why Trump no longer sees TikTok as a security threat, and Trump used that to turn the conversation back to Google.
In this part of the interview, Trump said that instead of breaking the company up, unspecified changes could be implemented to make things “more fair.” He also claimed that Pichai told Trump that he was the “number one person” on “all of Google” for stories before falling back onto some of his usual rhetoric about fake news.
The full quote:
I think it is a threat. Frankly I think everything’s a threat. There’s nothing that’s not a threat. But sometimes you have to fight through these threats. Like, Google: I’m not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair. They do treat me very badly. Oh and he told me, “No way, you’re the number one person on all of Google for stories.” Which probably makes sense to be honest to me, most of them are bad stories, but these are minor details, right? And it’s only bad because of fake news. Because the news is really fake. That’s the one we really have to straighten out. We have to straighten out our press because we have a corrupt press. [Applause]
These aren’t the first vague statements toward Google from Trump during this election cycle. In August, Trump said that Google “has to be careful” and that he “had a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down.” JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, called for a breakup of Google in February.
