Trump plugs Hawley’s new book over tech industry

Former President Trump on Friday urged the public to buy Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R) new book, in which the GOP lawmaker rails against the influence of large tech corporations like Facebook and Google. 

Trump in a press release from his Save America PAC promoted what he called a “fantastic” book from Hawley, titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” which was officially released on Tuesday. 

“Josh Hawley, our fantastic Senator from the beautiful and great State of Missouri, has a fantastic new book, just out this week, about the terrible Big Tech companies and their attempt to ruin our Country,” Trump wrote. 

The former president urged people to purchase the book, which he said “has my Full and Complete Endorsement.” 

Sen. Josh Hawley’s book gets a plug from former President Trump pic.twitter.com/f7BaV07GMw

— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4) May 7, 2021

In his book, Hawley, a populist conservative and vocal Trump backer who is widely viewed as a potential contender for the White House in 2024, argues that platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are “the robber barons of the modern era” and represent the “gravest threat to American liberty in decades.” 

Hawley, who has become one of the most vocal critics of social media platforms over claims of an anti-conservative bias, adds in the book that big tech companies are “determining elections, banning inconvenient political views, lining politicians’ pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars and addicting our kids to screens.” 

Ahead of his book’s release, the Missouri senator on Monday unveiled his “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act,” which aims to break up the “small group of woke mega-corporations” that Hawley argues have an overreaching amount of influence on the lives of Americans, and “restore competition” among tech companies. 

Under his proposal, Hawley seeks to reform the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts to make clear that evidence of engaging in anticompetitive behavior is enough to back an antitrust claim. 

Hawley, one of the leaders in the fight among lawmakers to challenge electoral votes in the 2020 election over unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud, was one of several Republicans who vocalized support for Trump this week when Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld the platform’s ban on the former president. 

The Missouri senator after the news broke called the decision a “real life example of the tyranny of #BigTech.”

“That’s what monopolies do,” he continued, adding, “Break them up.”