Apple has told Republican leaders it will not provide funding or other support for the party’s 2016 presidential convention, as it’s done in the past, citing Donald Trump’s controversial comments about women, immigrants and minorities. Apple’s political stand against Trump, communicated privately to Republicans, is a sign of the widening schism between Silicon Valley and the GOP’s bombastic presumptive nominee. Trump has called for a boycott of the company’s products, and has slammed CEO Tim Cook over Apple’s stance on encryption.
“I’m not surprised about it one bit,” the billionaire businessman told The Huffington Post on Saturday. “All Apple cares about is profits, and don’t get me wrong, I totally get that because I’m a businessman myself. But, there has to be a line between making money and doing the right thing. And the company’s stance on encryption, especially the clash it had with the FBI after the San Bernardino shooting, is just wrong. And let me tell you, this is just another one in a line of problems Apple has caused. I’m not even going to get into the tax evasion business, or the suicides in their factories in China.”
The Tea Party’s presumptive nominee also said that among the first things he plans to do when he makes President will be to force the company to move its production back into the United States from China. “I’m serious about it,” Trump argued, “they employ tens of thousands of people around the world. And the jobs they give out in China, they’re not there because Chinese workers are more skilled than American ones. They’re in China because it costs less to have a Chinese bot assemble an iPhone than it does to have an American worker do the same. It’s like I said, they’re all about profits and they don’t care what they have to do to make it happen.”
Asked how he plans to force one of the biggest players in the tech industry to shift its cost-effective Chinese production back to the more-expensive American surroundings, Trump simply said, “I’ll shut them down if they refuse.” And while this move would be extremely difficult to realize, given the fact that not even the President of the United States has the power to veto the existence of a major contributor to the national budget, history teaches us that Donald Trump is anything but a maker of false threats. “I’ll shut them down so hard Tim Cook is going to start praying to St. Steve Jobs for me to back down,” the real estate mogul promised.
“Because, just look at what happens when companies like Apple are left to do whatever they want. The company used subsidiaries in Ireland to pay lower taxes, thereby damaging the United States budget by no less than $8 billion. Are you kidding me? That’s almost what I make in a week. Just think how many illegal immigrants we could deport with that kind of money, or how many miles of the Trump Wall we could build. This is no joke people, and the sooner Apple realizes I mean business, the better. If not, they’re going to have to switch to Windows just to pay the fines. But I wouldn’t worry if I were them, Bill Gates is known as a very generous man. I’m sure he’ll hook them up with some cool PCs,” the media magnate jokingly added.