Dr Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute wrote this in the NY Times this week:
Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.
That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.
I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.
The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.
The money talks, as you can see by the chart above. And that’s extremely weird considering that the Republican Party has been the party of Big Business for the last century. Not anymore.
According to Sonnenfeld, business didn’t like his “populist” image in 2016 but gave him a chance. (They liked the tax cuts, of course.) But he didn’t endear himself to them otherwise:
Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
They aren’t all that fond of Biden either. They don’t like antitrust enforcement and his attacks on corporate greed. On the other hand, they like the infrastructure investment and CHIPs Act and they are giddy, as one might expect, over the roaring stock market and the US’s new status as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.
They’re very nervous about the fact that Trump will have MAGA extremists running things in the next administration and really hate some of his new policy proposals:
Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.
I don’t actually think Karl Marx has anything to do with it, but setting that aside, these execs seem to be sane enough to recognize that Trump is totally inept:
As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.
These are not my people, obviously, and I don’t look up to them as paragons. But they are practical enough to see that Trump is bad for business, just as he’s bad for the country as a whole. I appreciate any signs of GOP sanity wherever I can find it these days. It’s rare.