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Apple CEO Tim Cook Called Out For Playing Trump’s Game, Failing to Correct Him

By Charlie NashNov 21st, 2019, 1:27 pm

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Journalists called out Apple CEO Tim Cook this week for failing to correct President Donald Trump’s claims that he had just opened a factory which has been making Apple computers since 2013.

New York Times reporter Jack Nicas was one of Cook’s fiercest critics.

“It was a pretty typical publicity event, until the end. Mr. Trump walked in front of the news cameras and took credit for the plant, suggesting it had opened that day,” wrote Nicas in an article, noting that, “The plant has been making Apple computers since 2013.”

“Immediately after Mr. Trump’s comments, Mr. Cook thanked the president and his staff,” Nicas reported. “He did not correct the record.”

“The moment was part of a bizarre afternoon in Texas, where the president played up a six-year-old factory as evidence of his three-year-old presidency’s success in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States,” Nicas claimed. “It showed Mr. Trump’s willingness to leverage his influence over American companies in his pitch to voters that he deserves another four years in the White House. And it illustrated the complicated position that Mr. Cook and other corporate executives find themselves in with this president, forced to stand silently by while he sometimes misleads about their businesses.”

Vox also took aim at Cook in an article on Thursday.

“Remember Tim Apple — the alter ego Trump created for the Apple CEO earlier this year? Well, he’s struck again. And he’s letting the president blatantly lie about the goings-on at his company in order to use Apple as a marketing tool for his presidency,” wrote Vox’s Emily Stewart. “You could argue that Cook wasn’t quite sure that the president was saying the plant had just opened… But later in the day, it became abundantly clear that Trump was, in fact, making up a plant opening — and Apple still isn’t saying a word about it.”

“It’s not new for Trump to lie; he does it a lot,” she continued. “But for one of the most valuable companies in the world to allow itself to be used as part of a false marketing campaign from the president of the United States is, to put it lightly, not great.”

Bill Kristol, the former founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, criticized Cook’s appearance with Trump for a different reason, commenting, “I suppose it would be asking too much for Tim Cook simply to have politely stepped aside and away from the president when Trump turned their silly Apple promo event into a partisan attack on Democrats, an assault on the media, and lies about the weighty question of impeachment.”

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