About two months ago, John P. Coale, one of many lawyers representing Donald Trump in a personal capacity, met with several Alphabet executives, mediators, and lawyers at Mar-a-Lago — along with his client. They all spent a lovely day at the palatial Florida estate, and Trump treated them to lunch as they chatted about anything but the antitrust cases being prosecuted against Google.
Coale was keen not to broach the matter, he told The Verge in an interview, since “it could be dicey.” Whenever someone else skirted the topic of the antitrust cases — “not Google and not me,” he was quick to clarify — both he and the Google people would “jump” in to say, “That has nothing to do with this. We’re not getting near that.”
By the end of September, the results of that “nice lunch” were made public: YouTube, another subsidiary of Alphabet, was paying out a $24.5 million settlement to Trump and several allies for a completely different lawsuit that Trump and several allies filed in 2021 — accusing YouTube of violating their First Amendment rights by suspending their channels — with no admission of guilt. Coale represented Trump in that suit.
Alphabet currently faces two antitrust lawsuits from the federal government that could theoretically result in a breakup (although, after a recent milquetoast remedies ruling in the Google Search case, the possibility is diminishing). One lawsuit had been filed during the first Trump administration and brought to trial under Joe Biden’s administration; the other had been both filed and litigated by Biden’s Justice Department. When Trump was sworn back into office, his new administration — now stacked with longtime haters of Big Tech — did not drop those lawsuits.
The YouTube case, on the other hand, was a totally different beast: a class-action suit filed by Trump and several other MAGA channels as private citizens in 2021, in which Trump alleged that the video platform had illegally censored his speech by suspending his channel after the January 6th riots.
YouTube could have easily dismissed Trump’s claims, said Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University specializing in tech law. “There was no legal basis to the lawsuit,” he told The Verge in an email. “YouTube is a private company. It is not subject to the First Amendment. It can decide to terminate an account for no reason at all, and it certainly can decide to terminate one that violates its terms of service, as Trump did. This is a political payoff, pure and simple.”
Or, to put it another way: YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, has become one of the largest donors to Trump’s White House ballroom vanity project.
In the court filings detailing the settlement, Trump directed that his $22 million YouTube payout be donated to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that assists the National Park Service in maintaining the park surrounding the White House, and earmarked it specifically for the construction of the White House State Ballroom.
Earlier this year, Trump announced plans to expand the White House, demolish Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden, and build a massive 900-seat ballroom in its place, inspired by the ballroom at his golf club in Turnberry. Its construction will cost an estimated $200 million, and will be funded by Trump and several private donors. According to CBS News, several tech companies have reportedly committed to donating $5 million or more to the ballroom project — including Google, another company under the Alphabet umbrella.
If accurate, Alphabet’s money would constitute a minimum of $27 million to the ballroom project, or 13.5 percent of the targeted fundraise. (When reached for comment on this story, Alphabet referred to the $22 million earmarked in the settlement for the ballroom’s construction.)
MAGAworld has had innumerable gripes about Alphabet, a company whose leadership openly supported the Democratic Party. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were close to Barack Obama during his presidency, and eventually hired several officials from his administration once they left the White House. Chairman Eric Schmidt was a major supporter of Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and himself became a target of early MAGA attacks when he appeared in Clinton’s leaked emails. As such, over the years, the company’s been a prime target of innumerable GOP-led congressional investigations and hearings about Big Tech allegedly censoring conservative speech on social media.
And Trump himself nursed a personal grudge. As early as 2018, Trump was complaining that Google’s search algorithm was “rigged” against him, citing a report claiming that searches for Trump-related news were only returning articles from “National Left-Wing Media.” Google has consistently denied Trump’s claims, saying that its search algorithm was unable to be manipulated for political purposes, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from seeking to punish Google.
“This is a political payoff, pure and simple.”
So far, the Search algorithm has been spared from the Trump administration’s ire. But YouTube was a much more straightforward target for a suit, in that it was more obvious that real humans at YouTube were making decisions on what content or creators to remove. And content creators — specifically, the conservative creators who make the kind of content that YouTube removed — are a core component of the MAGA coalition. “That’s where the rubber hits the road,” a Republican tech lobbyist told The Verge.
Between 2020 and 2023, YouTube had been proactive in removing content that spread misinformation about covid, vaccines, and the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. This deplatformed scores of right-wing content creators such as Dan Bongino, the American Conservative Union (which hosts CPAC), and author Naomi Wolf. In January 2021, YouTube suspended then-President Trump’s channel after he egged on the January 6th rioters in the US Capitol, preventing him from uploading videos due to “concerns about the ongoing potential for violence.”
Though YouTube began walking back some of those content policies starting in 2023, even reinstating Trump’s channel in 2023 in time for the 2024 presidential election, YouTube’s legal team had tried repeatedly to get the lawsuit dismissed over the years. Trump’s allies, however, continually pressed the platform about alleged anti-conservative discrimination. In the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a longtime Google hawk, used his subpoena power to get emails between YouTube and the Biden administration, claiming in March 2024 that they proved that the White House had a heavy hand in drafting YouTube’s content moderation policies.
Behind the scenes, Coale’s team was continuing to press YouTube about its content moderation, claiming that its policies still targeted conservatives. “They weren’t brought up as deal-breakers or brought up as, You [YouTube] have gotta do this or we’re walking, but we had a lot of discussions about [how] they cannot collude with the government like they did with Biden and FBI,” Coale, who worked the case pro bono, said.
Coale, who also represented Trump and several other plaintiffs in similar class-action cases against Meta and Twitter, said that he had relied on a Supreme Court ruling that more or less said that “if you are a private actor, and you work with the government [and] they’re pushing you to do things, and you do them, then for the purpose of the lawsuit, you become the government. The government can’t deny you the First Amendment, which they did to the plaintiffs. They can’t just say, Well, we’re a private company, we do what we want. That’s true, unless there’s government action involved.”
It’s not clear which case Coale is referring to. Coale did not respond to a follow-up text asking for clarification.
“No, the law doesn’t say that,” said Lemley, when asked about Coale’s description of this unknown Supreme Court case. “The only case I can imagine coming close to this is the case on ‘jawboning,’ where people challenged government officials trying to persuade private companies to do what they want.” In Murthy v. Missouri, conservative state attorneys general sued the Biden administration for allegedly pressuring social media companies into suppressing covid misinformation.
But, as Lemley points out, in 2024 the Supreme Court ended up ruling against the conservatives who brought the case. And even if they had won, the case “would have been about the illegality of government conduct. It wouldn’t have made the First Amendment apply to private decisions.”
According to Coale, his behind-the-scenes conversations with YouTube changed once Trump returned to office.
The YouTube settlement can’t be decontextualized from the larger threats facing its parent company. Google recently escaped an existential breakup last month when federal Judge Amit Mehta ruled that it did not have to sell off Chrome or Android, despite ruling earlier that it held an illegal monopoly over search engines. But at the moment, the Department of Justice is arguing in a separate trial that Google should be forced to sell off AdX, its digital advertising exchange, after Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled earlier this year that Google held an illegal monopoly over two ad tech markets.
And even if they escape that case, the Justice Department might appeal — people like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are already pressuring DOJ to appeal the remedies in the Search case.
Google will always remain under threat from this administration, said the Republican tech lobbyist. “The FTC could bring other actions as well,” he said, noting that it was stacked with anti-Big Tech populists like Chair Andrew Ferguson. “None [have been] taken yet, but the threat is always there. It’s a gun on the table.”
The donation is an extremely effective type of ego-stroking
When YouTube announced last week that it would offer creators banned under covid and election-denialism policies a path back onto the platform, it also sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that effectively served as a mea culpa. In it, YouTube’s lawyers claimed that the Biden administration and the White House had repeatedly and consistently “pressed” them to remove right-wing content, creating “a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms.” (In a response, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin accused the Republicans of forcing a “false and coerced confession” from Alphabet, stating that the letter was “radically inconsistent with the actual testimony of Alphabet employees” during earlier investigations.)
Alphabet’s contribution to the ballroom fund is not a straightforward guarantee that they’ll escape a federal breakup, so long as Google’s haters are working in the Trump administration. “That’s the larger picture here, especially after what you saw with [the FCC’s] Brendan Carr going after Jimmy Kimmel. I know it’s a different agency, but it’s the same point,” the Republican tech lobbyist said. “The [administration] is very political and they want to do things that are going to make Trump happy.”
But the donation is an extremely effective type of ego-stroking. Although Trump runs an administration full of conservative ideologues, he’s also famously receptive to anyone who can properly flatter him, regardless of their political leanings, and will quickly override his subordinates when a sycophant makes him happier. And the thing that makes Trump just as happy as the persecution of his enemies — perhaps even more so — is if they give him an extra $22 million to build his grand ballroom.
“Everyone’s happy,” said Coale. “The president’s happy. The other plaintiffs are happy.”
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