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.)

A third member of the Oval Office group was more surprising: Mike Davis, a former aide to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley who has emerged as one of Trump’s most wildly combative supporters in Washington — both on X and at his Article III Project, which describes itself as bringing “brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare.”

Davis was among the Republicans who last fall promised, and accurately anticipated, a campaign of retribution against Trump’s enemies.

While none of the participants in the meeting with Trump would share its contents, Davis appeared to refer to it in a pair of X posts last Tuesday: “Challenge accepted,” he posted at 1:32 pm, responding to a Trump supporter’s concern that Zuckerberg had the White House “on lock.” That evening, Davis replied to his own post: “Mission accomplished.”

Davis has also made his point of view clear on social media and in a recent interview on Steve Bannon’s War Room, where he is a regular contributor. Trump should break up Meta on the merits, Davis has said — and he shouldn’t make any deal with a political enemy.

“Mark Zuckerberg rigged and stole the 2020 election, and that’s why President Trump got chased out of the WH, why he faced 4 years of unprecedented, Republic-ending lawfare,” Davis said on War Room, referring to an estimated $400 million in Zuckerberg family contributions to a nonprofit effort to expand pandemic-era voting accommodations.

(The grants were accepted primarily by Democrats, though a later study found no evidence they affected the outcome of elections.)

“I just can’t believe that President Trump would let Mark Zuckerberg go into the Oval Office and take down his pants,” Davis wrote.