Alabama native and Apple CEO Tim Cook does not appear to have a problem currying favor with President Donald Trump.
Last Friday, Cook dined with the president and first lady at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, NJ, marking Cook’s sixth private meeting with POTUS or his family in the nineteen months he has been in office.
Cook’s coziness with the Trump administration is particularly baffling and insulting for some Alabamians, given the Apple chief turned his nose up on his home state long ago for the same reasons he has criticized the president.
Cook has piled on Trump over social issues, not to mention the likes of the Paris climate accords, immigration and tariffs.
One cannot help but remember the Auburn graduate’s infamous and public 2014 spit-in-the-face of his home state – that time when he was being so graciously inducted into the Alabama Hall of Honor and decided to mark the occasion by belittling its citizens and lecturing them on how to live.
Yellowhammer News founder Cliff Sims unloaded on Cook at the time. Sims was right then, and Cook’s latest hypocrisy regarding Trump just further cements his point.
“[Tim Cook] can get pub[licity] anytime, but chose a ceremony where he’s being honored to lecture the state he left on how we should live. Low class,” Sims said on Twitter.
He continued, “How about opening up an Apple factory in AL? Actually help some folks, instead of just swooping in to lecture us, then leaving.”
At one point, Apple was talking about bringing some jobs to Cook’s home state but the move was contingent on the Alabama legislature passing an LGBTQ-rights bill — at least that was the hot rumor floating around Montgomery at the time.
Almost four full years later, Alabama is home to Google and is adding a major Amazon distribution center in Bessemer while Cook still has his back squarely turned on the place he was born and raised.
If he can look past the president’s perceived faults in the name of business, why will Cook not do the same with Alabama?
Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
