On Wall Street and in C-suites across the country, titans of American industry and capital are aghast. How could President Donald Trump plunge us into ruinous trade wars amid yo-yoing tariffs and send markets into chaos ahead of a widely speculated recession? They gave him their support and their donations, and this is how he repays them? The better question is: How were they so naïve as to think this wouldn’t happen? It’s hard not to take some satisfaction in the sudden distress of the plutocrats. “This is not what we voted for,” tweeted billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. “What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war?” You don’t say.
Republican megadonor and Home Depot founder Ken Langone called the tariffs “bull—t.” The New York Times reports that other Trump donors have been frantically calling the White House, trying to convince the administration to reverse course. “I feel like a sucker,” TV finance guru Jim Cramer said. They must not have been listening when Trump promised—literally every day on the campaign trail—that this was precisely what he would do. Some corporate leaders may have believed they were buying special favors when they ponied up seven-figure sums. Tim Cook of Apple, for instance, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and that seems to have paid off: The administration just exempted smartphones and computers from its tariffs (most iPhones are assembled in China). Whether or not the tech magnates saw this coming, most corporate Trump supporters seem to have made a familiar calculation: Trump is a business guy who’ll cut taxes and eliminate regulation. The economy will flourish, and that’ll be good for everyone—especially us.
That may sound like the hard-headed rationality we’re supposed to expect from capitalists, but it’s anything but. In fact, their support for Trump was always deeply emotional, helped along by an unwillingness to look at the facts. Here’s the most important truth: The economy has consistently done better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones by almost any measure available. For all that corporate leaders complain that Democratic power will rob us of economic liberty, they’ve always prospered under Democratic presidents. Surely they know that corporate profits hit record levels under former President Joe Biden, for instance. So why did so many big business overlords believe it was so urgent that Trump return to the Oval Office?
That reason is ideology. The people who sit atop the economic pyramid are, for the most part, pretty conservative just as a matter of personal inclination. They’d rather see their companies suffer through another Republican recession (and nine of the last ten recessions started under GOP presidents) than have their tax rates go up by a point or two. They don’t like it when Democrats talk about greedy CEOs; it’s not enough to get richer and richer, they want to be loved. So they ignored not just Trump’s outlandish tariff threats, which anyone who understands the economy knew would be disastrous, but his impulsivity and instability. Now, they watch with the rest of us as Trump and Elon Musk attack our world-leading universities, cripple our extraordinary system of scientific and technical research, and try to undo landmark industrial policy—with potentially catastrophic effects on long-term economic prospects. In fairness, perhaps the plutocrats fooled themselves into thinking Trump would be good for the economy because things went pretty well on that score in his first term (at least until the pandemic arrived). But what we have now is Trump without limits, the truest version of himself. The damage he can do is only beginning to come into focus. Now, the business elite are appalled—as are small business owners, by the way. They knew Republicans would go after immigrants, trans kids, and Medicaid recipients; that was no big deal. But they thought Trump was one of them, so he’d have their interests at heart. For all they flatter themselves that their wealth is a sign of their brilliance, they were just as gullible as anyone.
