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In public, only a handful of business leaders support Trump. Private life is a different story. At least, that’s how Trump is conveying it.
Over the past few weeks, he has boasted about the warm reception he has been receiving from the CEO. At a recent rally, he said Google chief Sundar Pichai called him out for praise for a photo shoot at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. The Apple chief, Tim Cook, reportedly called him to discuss the company’s legal troubles in Europe. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was said to have called him over the summer after his assassination attempt.
And after years of attacks from Trump over his ownership of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos blocked endorsements of Kamala Harris’ paper. Bezos said the paper would not be endorsed as it has been for half a century to avoid any perception of media bias.
It all seems like a face compared to a few years ago when they had the same executives praise He publicly criticized Trump for Joe Biden’s victory and the January 6 attack.
And Trump is the very same person. He continues to insist that the rebellion is actually a “day of love” and has made it clear that he will not accept the results of the election even if he loses. “That’s the only way we lose, because they cheat,” he said at a rally in September.
But what may appear as silence from America’s chief executives is actually restraint, according to some in the business community.
“They have an obligation to work with the president, so they don’t want to be hostile and not be able to work with him,” says the author, who tracks C-Suite executives’ political preferences, said Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. “But the undeniable historical fact is that there has never been a president in American history who was less popular for his country’s business leadership than Donald Trump.”
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Sonnenfeld noted that executives have historically supported Republican candidates. However, only one Fortune 100 CEO has publicly supported Trump, Elon Musk.
“He’s got one. That’s pretty telling,” Sonnenfeld said. “John McCain and Mitt Romney had half the business community. In 2016 it dropped to zero.”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this month. Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Trump’s first term was a boon for businesses, which saved $240 billion from 2018 to 2021 thanks to the former president’s corporate tax cuts.
But Sonnenfeld said many business leaders aren’t fans of Trump’s plans for tariffs and large-scale deportations.
“They hate the way Trump creates wedge issues and false propaganda to divide the country, whether it be their personal values or not,” he said.
‘Press stories focus on a very short list of men on both sides who simply don’t show [of the climate],” Ballou-Aares said. “There are a lot of different types of groups that are coming together on the business side” to support Harris, she said.
But leaders have to walk a fine line, especially since Trump is known to be a shameful deal. In May, he stunned A group of oil and gas executives said when he told them they should donate $1 billion to his campaign, he made a “deal” considering he would actually reverse environmental rules and cut taxes. What will happen? During his previous term, he gave his closest supporters a direct line to the White House.
Trump has vowed to unleash retribution on those who oppose him if he takes office again. And executives don’t want their companies on the receiving end of Trump’s backlash. Some people have already experienced the tidal wave of abuse that can come from appearing “woke.”
“You could be more glamorous if they were just these billionaires investing their wallets. But they’re investing all the stakeholders in their community and their workforce. and has custodial surveillance on its customers,” Sonnenfeld said. “They know this is a very divided country and they don’t want to cause anything unnecessarily.”
It’s also a different political environment compared to the 2020 election, with the pandemic still keeping many shut down and the Black Lives Matter protests from the summer leading to a racial reckoning across the business world. I was forced to. When Biden became president, companies saw fewer demands from consumers and employees to speak out. Instead, companies have seen more backlash from conservative groups.
Elizabeth Doty, director of the Corporate Politics Task Force at the University of Michigan’s ERB Institute, said: “Companies were really worried about making a commitment. They were worried they couldn’t back it up or that it was exposing them to attack, legal and reputational damage.”
Doty said if companies were once responsive to politics, leaders are trying to make them more attuned to the political climate.
“They try to position themselves as politically neutral with a principled stance, but that is reportedly opportunistic. It invites them to become more of a political football,” Doty said. When thinking about how companies can come out on political and social issues, Doty and other researchers find that even when trying to remain politically neutral, companies can be more sensitive to government and electoral processes. We have found it important to highlight supporting institutions like .
When Bezos announced his Explaining why he blocked the president’s endorsement of the post less than two weeks after the election, he called it a “principled decision.”
“I assure you that my views here are principled in nature,” he wrote. However, in the operation, Bezos was not clear exactly what his principles were.
“Being principled means being clear about what you’re for, not what you’re against,” Doty said. “There’s always a way to do it that’s not hostile to the candidate.”
“If there’s a catastrophic tantrum, they’re all ready to jump into action, like they’ve done before,” Sonnenfeld said.
ballou-aares with leadership current projects Signatures collected From numerous business leaders calling on candidates to abide by election laws and accept the legitimacy of the election.
“We need to make sure that there is a very broad coalition to support the legitimacy of the electoral process itself,” Ballou-Aares said. “When we are in a situation where we are in a closely contested election, there is an effort to weaken the coalition.”
Public silence and private politics now make business sense. If Trump wins next week, Corporate America will face a bigger test.
Source: www.theguardian.com
