Kaplan’s conduct has long betrayed an affinity for realpolitik. His image is that of a consummate professional, amenable to compromise and broadly nonpartisan. When, in the summer of 2020, Trump penned one of his most controversial tweets about the riots in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”), it was Kaplan who was brought in to do damage control. While furore was erupting back at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, with staff threatening to walk out if Trump’s post wasn’t taken down, Kaplan found the answer to his predicament in semantics. The phrase could, he said, be understood as an incitement to violence, but it could just as easily be read as a neutral comment on the state’s use of force, or even a prediction. When Trump later claimed he had intended the sentence “as fact, not as statement”, staff at Meta said that he might as well have been reading off the memo Kaplan’s team had prepared for him.
