Trump threatens Mark Zuckerberg with life imprisonment over election

Donald Trump has written a book, and true to his reputation, it contains some deeply unbalanced textual reflections.

Accordingly Politico, the illustrated book with the title Save America – accuses Mark Zuckerberg of planning to rig the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden and warns that the Meta CEO will “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he crosses Trump again.

The book, which will be released next week, includes a photo of Zuckerberg and Trump during an undated meeting at the White House. According to Politico, In In the caption below the photo, Trump claims that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinner, be as nice as one can be, and all the while plan to install shameful lockers, a true plot against the President.”

“We are watching him closely,” Trump added, “and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison – like others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.”

The former president is referring to a conspiracy theory that circulated in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which claims that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan used a $350 million investment in the Center for Tech and Civic Life – a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides election administration resources to thousands of constituencies during the Covid-19 pandemic – to rig the election against him.

In an interview with Fox Business in June 2021, Trump falsely claimed that he “won the election,” that the Democrats had “cheated,” and that “Facebook and [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg installed $500 million worth of fake safe deposit boxes and some of them contained 96 percent of Biden's votes – 96 percent!”

That claim was false then and it remains false today. Yet nearly four years after the incident, Trump is still using it to sow doubts about the 2020 election.

Zuckerberg himself has sought to appease angry Republicans who have targeted Meta and its affiliated companies in a series of congressional investigations over their content moderation policies.

Earlier this week, the Facebook founder wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee – one of the most powerful committees in Congress currently controlled by Trump Republicans – in which he blamed the Biden administration for its Covid-era social media policies that limited the spread of misinformation related to the virus and expressed regret over the company's role in the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

“For months in 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed deep frustration with our teams when we did not agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“In another case, the FBI warned us about a possible Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family and Burisma in the run-up to the 2020 election,” he added. “It has since been clarified that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in hindsight we should not have downgraded the story. We have changed our policies and processes to ensure this does not happen again.”

While Zuckerburg can beg for forgiveness from Republicans in the House, that obviously won't stop Trump from continuing to use him as a scapegoat for his election conspiracies – especially if he loses again in November.