Donald Trump has issued his latest challenge to test corporate America’s fealty to his administration. On Friday, the President decided to wade into the personnel decision of Microsoft and called for the company to fire its President of Global Affairs, Lisa Monaco, over her previous work under the Obama and Biden administrations—a warning shot fired apparently at the advice of far-right activist Laura Loomer.
Trump called Monaco, who previously served as the deputy attorney general during the Biden administration and Homeland Security Advisor to President Obama, “Corrupt and Totally Trump Deranged,” He also claimed that because of her ties to the previous administrations, she is “a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government”—a statement that likely doesn’t not read like a threat to review and potentially revoke lucrative federal procurements that Microsft has landed.
“It is my opinion that Microsoft should immediately terminate the employment of Lisa Monaco,” Trump wrote. Microsoft declined to comment when contacted by Gizmodo.
Why the President issuing opinions on an employee who doesn’t even appear on Microsoft’s leadership team page? It appears that it’s because Laura Loomer got in his ear again. Back in July, Loomer took aim at Monaco, tying her to Microsoft’s decision to use engineers in China to help provide tech support to the Defense Department. The connections take some red string and corkboard to make, but Loomer went ahead and connected the dots.
On Friday, she took credit for the President following suit and calling for Microsoft to dismiss Monaco. “After I alerted President Trump to the fact that Microsoft has hired Lisa Monaco to be their new President of Global Affairs, he has just called on Microsoft to terminate her employment,” she wrote on X. (For what it’s worth, Monaco was hired in May, and Loomer didn’t mention her until July, so apparently it takes a while for her alerts to get to Trump’s desk.)
In the post, she also tagged Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and asked, “Are you going to comply?” which certainly has some echoes of Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr telling ABC, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” in regards to punishing Jimmy Kimmel over a monologue that conservatives didn’t like. It sure feels like an attempt to compel corporations to capitulate to the wishes of the administration—though, at least in Loomer’s case, she doesn’t have any formal power.
If anything, Trump may be better off with Monaco stuck in a corporate office somewhere rather than back in legal waters serving as cop on the beat. Under Biden, Monaco was involved in the creation of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which led crackdowns on crypto scams similar to the ones the President and his family have profited from. Prior to that, she served as a member of the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force and was involved in the prosecution of five former Enron executives.
