The CEOs Are Warming to Trump

Just about three years ago, Time’s Molly Ball dropped an epic piece of reportage on the wild months from Joe Biden’s presidential victory through the terrifying events of January 6, 2021. During this fraught time, an unusual champion emerged in the fight to protect democracy: corporate America. As Ball documented, “the forces of capital” teamed up with “the forces of labor” to rebuff the loser who refused to admit he had lost, with “hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, [calling] on him to concede.”

It’s hard to know where we’d be today if this unity campaign hadn’t emerged. Sadly, I have grave doubts that Big Business is going to re-up for another campaign to save America, as some CEOs are already making clear that they don’t find Trump so dangerous after all.

Longtime readers will recall that I take a pretty jaundiced view of the idea that corporate America has a vital role to play as a stabilizing force in our democracy. But I’m happy to acknowledge that the most recent vintage of right-wing rhetoric sometimes makes it seem like Republicans and corporate America are headed for some kind of split. Not long after Ball’s reporting, The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board published a lengthy screed about the “left turn of many corporate CEOs” and their failure to remain “a reliable friend of capitalism”—just one of the larger rounds expended in the right’s war on “woke corporations.”

TNR’s Osita Nwanevu wasn’t buying it. “It’s preposterous to characterize them as material enemies of the right given that they clearly want to funnel money and resources to Republican lawmakers any way they can without raising hackles from vigilant activists,” he wrote. “They owe their market power and low tax burdens to conservative policies, after all, and for all the right’s moaning and groaning about ‘woke capital,’ Republican rule is still a better deal for them than Democratic governance.”

Faced with the prospect of another four years of Democratic governance—especially under the auspices of a president who has showered more favor on the labor movement than any of his recent Democratic predecessors—corporate America seems to be returning to its old malodorous form. The most telling sign came, naturally, at Davos, where J.P. Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon began the process of making peace with Trump’s return: “Take a step back. [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”

As Brian Beutler pointed out in his Off Message newsletter, this was worthy of alarm bells: “The question of whether elites, particularly center-right elites, choose to abide fascism is central to the survival of democracy.” In a later post, Beutler dove deeper into Dimon’s rhetoric, and found evidence that whatever ties that might have bound him to the more high-flown ideals of our democracy were fraying:

There’s no way to know for sure whether the political media will successfully discern the con of Dimon plumping Trump as a “populist everyman,” especially given the fact that over the course of the Trump era, they have continually conflated “populism” with “boorishness.” Still, this isn’t the worst development from the perspective of those who are running Democratic campaigns this year—it would be ideal to raise the salience of a Wall Street embrace of Trump, especially considering Biden’s vastly superior record on labor. As TNR contributor KJ Boyle documented at length, life for the average worker got vastly worse during Trump’s reign.

Biden’s vital corrections to that grim era may, in fact, be the very reason that Dimon is looking to the orchestrator of the attacks on the U.S. Capitol for relief. It wouldn’t be the first time such an alliance was attempted: Back in 1933, a cabal of financiers attempted to orchestrate what came to be known as “the Business Plot,” a plan to overthrow President Roosevelt’s government via an ersatz uprising of aggrieved veterans. They made the mistake of asking retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the famously repentant author of War Is a Racket to lead it, only to learn the hard way what a blunder it was to ask a man of great integrity to lead a campaign against democracy when he instead sold the coup plotters out. Suffice it to say, Donald Trump does not offer similar impediments.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.