Last Tuesday afternoon, just six days after Mark Zuckerberg’s third meeting with Donald Trump this year, the Meta CEO’s key antagonists in the federal government arrived in the Oval Office.

The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement.

Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta. The social media giant has pushed the president to settle a lawsuit that began in his first term, and continued through the Biden years, which seeks to force the company to divest Instagram and Whatsapp. (The FTC is an independent agency, but both Meta and many of its foes have prepared for Trump to shape the handling of the lawsuit.)