As for the political content of this article, I would argue that Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks. Certainly, Big Tech knew how to shut him up when he was doing an actual self-coup. What changed between Trump I and II is that the liberal establishment saw this act and realized they'd let Big Tech get away with murder. Antitrust is Big Tech's existential threat, and that's a power Trump absolutely does wield.
Of course, Trump is not the only person wielding this power. The EU, Japan, and other countries are passing laws to strip Apple of their power to control apps. So they need Trump to use US trade policy - the biggest lever we have[1] - to beat the EU into compliance with Apple's rules.
There's an additional wrinkle in this story, though. Musk isn't actually favored by Trump anymore. He was a Trotsky - useful to the Trump regime's ascendance to power but not necessary now that it's in place. I don't think Trump is actually defending Twitter from Apple's actions so much as this has always been the limit of Apple's power.
Going back to Tumblr, there's a reason Apple went after them. They were small, and easy to bully. For all Apple's grandstanding about "privacy is a human right", the only thing they did to stop, say, Facebook[0] was take away IDFAs. Facebook has blatantly violated Apple's guidelines time and time again, up to and including shipping ad tracking VPNs using Enterprise signing certs, which is extremely forbidden by Apple policy. If you or me did this, we'd be so blacklisted from writing iOS code we wouldn't even be able to open Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. And all this happened before Trump II figured out how to threaten the economy into compliance.
Twitter has shrunk from what they were pre-Musk, but they're still big enough that they can pay the third world to tell Americans why America should kill people who live in the third world. An iPhone that can't Tweet is materially worse, so Apple is going to let Twitter get away with murder (or, more specifically, trafficking CSAM). If you're big enough, the laws do not apply.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
[1] This is literally the stick we used to copypaste DMCA 1201 into the local law of basically every country, over the objections of everyone including Americans!
I genuinely wonder what it will take for people who think like you to understand the dangerous slope the world is on because of just Trump and his cult.
To make my political opinion more clear, the reason why Trump is able to do all this insane shit is because everyone in a position to tell him "No" has decided not to. Most of the political fights he wins are because he bribed or demoralized the other side into not showing up - not because he's winning on merit or power.
Meanwhile the actual voters - the people who matter - are way angrier at Trump than they were last term. Trump fucked up the Epstein files so badly the House had to pass a law to force him to follow his own god damned campaign promises. The MAGA coalition is falling apart. And on the other side, candidates that actually promise economic relief (as opposed to social justice[0] only) are doing quite well. If the DNC were to pull their heads out of their asses and stop trying to run extremely unpopular candidates on the basis of "well, they're not Trump" and "it's her time" they'd be winning bigly.
[0] To be clear, the problem is not social justice in a vacuum. It's the use of it to avoid having to talk about economic issues. Ever since Obama we've had a string of neoliberals that emphasize social issues to avoid having to talk about the economy, even though at least some of those issues are downstream of economic problems they don't want to touch.
That's shortsighted. The Trump admin is sanctioning and pressuring other countries who try anything against X and Grok. The State Department is issuing strident threats. Abroad, they see X as a way to turn allies nationalistic and make their ideology sweep the world. At home, they see it as a tool to secure their power.