Bill Gates met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, according to multiple reports. What did the two men talk about? It sounds like Gates wanted to discuss global health initiatives. But news about recent moves by Gates to distance himself from a liberal nonprofit has folks wondering if there’s more going on with the Microsoft co-founder.
Trump’s meeting with Gates, first reported by NBC News, occurred “to discuss the importance of U.S. global health programs and health research that is necessary to save lives, protect Americans’ health, and preserve U.S. leadership in the world,” according to a statement by Gates’s representative to the New York Times.
President Trump has done tremendous damage to global health, taking a chainsaw to foreign aid programs administered by the U.S. government around the world. One of Trump’s first acts to start his second term was to abolish the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), along with the help of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Back in May, Gates told the New York Times that he wasn’t expecting the White House to do away with the agency, laying the blame largely on Musk: “He’s the one who cut the U.S.A.I.D. budget. He put it in the wood chipper.”
While Gates is known as a kind of technocratic liberal, the billionaire is happy to work with world leaders of just about any political persuasion in his pursuit to eradicate diseases. Gates has met with every U.S. president since at least Bill Clinton in the 1990s, including George W. Bush and Trump during his first term.
President George W. Bush with Bill Gates in Beijing, China on August 9, 2008. Photo: (George W. Bush Presidential Library)The Gates Foundation reportedly stopped making grants for a liberal nonprofit network called Arabella Advisors back in June, according to new reporting from the New York Times. The Gates charity has given about $450 million to Arabella Advisors to disperse over the course of the past 16 years, according to the newspaper, and there’s speculation that it’s because Gates wants to get on Trump’s good side. Gates has also tried to downplay DEI initiatives in a bid to placate Trump and “insulate” his foundation from political pressure, as the Times puts it.
But insulating probably isn’t the right word. When you try to make authoritarians happy you are doing their work for them. Gates has long been known as a man who cares about public health, but if you sell out your own principles to fascists you don’t really have any principles in the first place.
There’s also the possibility that Gates and Trump had a lot more to talk about at the White House beyond global health programs. Gates reportedly met with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein “dozens of times” between 2011 and 2014, according to the Daily Beast. Trump has been described by multiple people as the former “best friend” of Epstein before the two men had a falling out.
Maybe Bill and Don just had a chat about their old pal Jeff. You never know.
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