Recent headlines suggest that our nation's business leaders are backing presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump's campaign has touted endorsements from prominent investors like Steve Schwarzman and David Sachs, trying to convince people that our nation's top CEOs are again endorsing Trump for president.
That couldn't be further from the truth. They didn't flock to Trump before, and they aren't flocking to him now, as he continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate backing in the history of the Republican Party.
I know this because I run a school for them that I started 35 years ago, I work with about 1,000 CEOs a year, and I talk to business leaders almost every day, and our research shows that about 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.
The reality is that today's top corporate leaders, like many Americans, are not entirely happy with either President Trump or President Biden, but they generally like, or at least can tolerate, one of them, and they genuinely fear the other.
If you want the most compelling data point showing that corporate America is not enthusiastic about Trump, look at where they are putting their money. Not a single Fortune 100 CEO has donated to the candidate so far this year. That marks a stark shift from the overwhelming corporate and C-suite support for Republican presidential candidates going back more than a century, from the Taft administration through Coolidge and Bush, all of whom had the heads of dozens of major companies donating to their campaigns.
Trump secured the White House by riding on then-candidate Bernie Sanders' anti-corporate, populist message, a strategy he described when we met in 2015. The strategy may have won him favor with voters, but it did little to improve his image in the business world. Many CEOs tried to work with Trump, as they had done with the incumbent president, and many welcomed his decision to lower corporate tax rates, but caution lingered.
Several CEOs were outraged by Trump's divide-and-conquer tactics, personal attacks on companies and interventions that openly pitted competitors against one another. Many of them rushed to distance themselves from Trump's more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils after he equated anti-racism activists with white supremacists in 2017. Dozens of them publicly called for Trump's impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 riots.
Big business's relationship with Biden, and their likely future support for him, is complicated. The president has taken populist stances on business but has chafed under pressure from progressives to become more combative. Still, chief executives have frequently criticized what they see as overly restrictive antitrust enforcement and a misguided attack on corporate greed.
But Biden has some positives: infrastructure investments to rebuild highways and bridges that would help mitigate supply chain disruptions; government support for domestic semiconductor and electric vehicle production; record corporate profit growth and buoyant financial markets that have allayed widely expected fears of a recession; and the U.S.'s impressive transformation into the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas.
And their legitimate doubts about Biden are being swamped by fears about Trump in 2024. Gone are the more rational voices like Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Steven Mnuchin, Trump's main conduits to the business world during his first term, replaced by MAGA extremists and junior volleyball opportunists.
The MAGA stubborn voices that Trump hears have more in common with the far left than with traditional Republicans. Trump and his team have doubled down on his most anti-corporate instincts with proposals to impose a draconian 10% flat tariff on all imports, unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies such as stripping the Federal Reserve of its independence, the introduction of yield curve control to force lower interest rates, and a devaluation of the dollar, all of which would push inflation much higher. Trump's positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the business voices that are now in the minor leagues among Republican business supporters remain in the party today, and Republicans must be nostalgic for the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, when many business leaders supported him and 60 percent of his cabinet were chief executive officers.
So it was not surprising that Trump appeared to face a similarly lukewarm response from hundreds of corporate chief executives when he spoke at the Business Roundtable earlier this month, just as he received a lukewarm response from hundreds of corporate chief executives when he spoke at the Yale CEO Summit I hosted in 2005. There was not a single notable round of applause during Trump's “amazingly incoherent” remarks, and he struck a restrained, if not antagonistic, stance. The CEO is not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and believes in investing where there is rule of law, not master law.
The fact that more Fortune 100 CEOs based in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country, than currently support Trump (and only one Fortune 100 CEO is based in Rhode Island) illustrates just how isolated the Republican presidential candidate is from the corporate world.
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld is Professor of the Practice of Leadership at the Yale School of Management and Director of the Yale Institute for Chief Executive Leadership Studies.
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