Toyota Becomes Latest Auto Maker to Donate 7 Figures to Make Jan 20 Unforgettable

Two months ago, the Democratic candidate for president said, in no uncertain terms, that Donald Trump fancied himself as Hitler, that “he would turn the American military on the American people” and that “he has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

Practically nobody in the establishment media batted an eye at this.

(We did, of course, but pointing out the number of times The Western Journal has been a conservative Cassandra on issues like this would tire me out before I even got started. The point is, this was rhetoric from Vice President Kamala Harris and her retinue of surrogates, and it went mostly unchallenged in the global media village.)

Fast forward to a month and a half after Trump’s historic victory in the presidential election, where he took the Electoral College convincingly and even won the popular vote without really trying.

Apparently, Trump is so authoritarian, so Hitlerian, so appalling, that … major corporations, including those based in other countries, are dropping massive contributions to the president-elect’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

According to The Washington Times, Toyota’s arm in the United States has said that it would donate $1 million to the inauguration fund, becoming the latest company to do so.

The Christmas Eve report noted that that Ford and General Motors had also both donated $1 million each to the fund.

Toyota wouldn’t be donating vehicles, unlike GM and Ford — although that, to a certain level, is to be expected, given GM and Ford are American companies and Toyota isn’t.

“GM and Ford publicly announced their donations earlier this month, with the companies expressing optimism for the incoming Trump administration,” The Washington Times noted.

And it’s not just automakers — which, one could argue, are being spurred on by the looming threat of higher tariffs for outsourcing their supply lines — that are ponying up for the inauguration.

Take, for instance, Big Tech. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all announced in December that they’ll make $1 million donations to the inauguration fund, as well.

Zuckerberg, historically, has been a friend neither to Team Trump nor to conservatives. His platforms — particularly and Instagram — aren’t under threat from tariff or trade concerns.

Furthermore, in July, Zuckerberg said — after Trump got up and raised his fist following an assassin’s bullet grazing his ear — that the then-candidate getting up with blood covering his face and standing strong was “one of the most bada** things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“It’s just a recognition that there’s not much to be gained in outspoken opposition, but perhaps there is something to be gained by being very clear about your support and hope that Trump does well,” Margaret O’Mara, a Silicon Valley historian with the University of Washington, told NPR earlier this month.

So, wait — these companies are hoping an authoritarian, a Hitler-praising figure, does well? And letting the American public know it by their donations?

No, because they knew he was none of these things. So did Democrats.

But how were Democrats going to win the election? By pretending Trump was a threat to democracy, of course.

He was so much of a threat to democracy that, when their own democratically chosen candidate showed himself in the first presidential debate to be so mentally deficient as to be unelectable in the general election, they very undemocratically kicked him aside and put his vice president in his stead. Democracy is apparently too important to be entrusted to democratic methods.

Now that Harris has lost the general election, the battle continues, with two prominent Ivy League-educated lawyers penning an opinion piece in The Hill urging Congress to declare Trump ineligible to take office because Jan. 6 something-something-something, 14th Amendment yadda-yadda-yadda, and therefore he has to be disqualified!

Yes, apparently, the “insurrection” Trump tried to foment after the 2020 election was so dire that this time, the Democrats need to foment an insurrectionist move of their own, even though they lost the election bigly and with — as many in the establishment media put it four years ago — “the most secure election in history.”

(Do I have evidence of that? No. Do I have evidence it was sufficiently secure? Yes, because Trump’s margins of victory where it counted — and even where it didn’t — were so large that nobody could possibly contest the election on the grounds of rule changes or shenanigans.)

The only people who actually bought the “Hitler” argument, I suspect, were the Democratic Party diehards, the ones who get their messaging straight from CNN and “The View.”

The rest of them thought that keeping the White House was too important to trust to the facts, the Biden administration’s abysmally bad record, or even the voters. The shameless rhetoric stopped the moment they knew it wouldn’t work — which was, unfortunately for them, election night.

If vast numbers of Americans really believed the authoritarian lie, no major corporation would ever align itself with the incoming Trump administration. Those millions of dollars in donations would go to fighting it, or to protest movements, as the money did during the summer of 2020.

Instead, those donations are going toward Trump’s inauguration. And an event that was already going to be historic is getting money from major corporations to be truly unforgettable.

Tech and auto executives may be manipulative, but they’re not stupid. They know as well as the people who said it that the “Trump equals dictator” rhetoric was pure mendacity.

And there are millions of dollars in donations that prove it.

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