America's long national nightmare is almost over. President Joe Biden will leave office (and politics) forever at noon on Monday when Donald Trump is sworn in for a second term. The vibes are different this time. Trump is more popular than ever. The incumbent geezer is despised. What's left of the #Resistance is exhausted and exhausting. Fair-weather fans have fled in droves. The pussy marchers and the boycotters are decimated; corporations and celebrities no longer cowed into submission. One gets the sense that some of Trump's former opponents might be feeling a little embarrassed by their behavior over the past eight years, as they should be. There's hope for change again.

There's also been some performative shrieking—among Democratic politicians and the journalists who support them—about the fact that big-name corporations and their CEOs are writing huge checks to Trump's inaugural fund, just as many of them wrote huge checks to Barack Obama and other Democrats over the years, just without all the shrieking. But these powerful individuals are no longer afraid of the anti-Trump resistance; some are even calling out the rank hypocrisy.

"Funny, they never sent me one of these for contributing to [D]emocrats," wrote Open AI CEO Sam Altman in response to a letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) demanding that he and other tech executives explain the "rationale" behind their donations. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Microsoft were among the firms who contributed $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund either directly or through personal donations from their CEOs.