Trump to host Apple CEO Tim Cook in private Oval Office meeting
After attending a state dinner on Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to spend at least one more day in Washington, D.C., to talk with President Donald Trump in a closed-door meeting at the White House.
According to Trump’s public schedule, shared in a tweet by Toronto Star correspondent Daniel Dale, Cook is slated to appear at the Oval Office on Wednesday.
What the pair will discuss is unknown, as is the length of the meeting. Trump’s agenda notes Cook will arrive at 1:45 p.m., then skips to a briefing schedule that starts at 2 p.m. with a press gathering led by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Cook and Trump have met one-on-one before. The first official face-to-face was then President-Elect Trump’s Tech Summit in late 2016, which also included Silicon Valley CEOs and investors. Cook and Elon Musk joined Trump in a private meeting after the general assembly.
More recently, Cook last June was invited to discuss government waste, national security and Trump’s visa program alongside a panel of tech industry elite including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Intel’s Brian Krzanich and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. At the meeting, Cook reportedly suggested programming be made a mandatory subject in U.S. public schools, forwarding an education effort Apple has been pushing over the past few years.
Tomorrow’s meeting could cover a range of topics, from immigration to the environment to tax reform. Cook has disagreed with Trump on a number of hot-button issues since Trump entered the White House. Over the past year, Cook has personally called on Trump to keep DACA protections in place and not pull out of the Paris climate accord, requests that fell on deaf ears. At the Tech Summit in 2016, Cook said he wanted to start a dialogue on human rights, environmental advocacy, tax reform, job creation and intellectual property lawsuits.
More recently, Cook chimed in on the looming trade war between the U.S. and China, saying “calm heads” are needed to stabilize strained relations.