Then-President-elect Donald Trump listens during a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower last year in New York. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The chasm between conservative pro-free-market activists and those who actually operate in the market has gotten wider, as the former have become captives of those whose anti-government bile swamps their understanding of conditions necessary for business to thrive. One indication of the growing divide comes from chief executives, CNN reports:
A stunning 50% of the CEOs, business execs, government officials and academics surveyed at the annual Yale CEO Summit give [President] Trump an “F” for his first 130 days in office. The survey, released earlier this week, found that another 21% give Trump’s performance a “D” so far. Just 1% of the 125 leaders polled awarded the billionaire an “A.” … 80% of those surveyed are CEOs, including Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman and IBM boss Ginni Rometty, who sit on Trump’s advisory council and Merck CEO Ken Frazier, a member of the president’s manufacturing initiative. (Individual responses by each CEO were not released.
Unlike anti-government and anti-tax activists who see government as inherently bad and destructive, business leaders understand they cannot do it all. They rely on functional government to maintain infrastructure, educate potential workers, defend intellectual property, tamp down on international instability, open new markets, improve public education, defend a fair and impartial legal system and create predictable conditions for which to plan.
The Paris climate deal is a case in point. Ideologues rant about lost sovereignty (we actually set our own standards) and job-killing regulations (it’s a wash on jobs, in reality), while business leaders overwhelmingly favor the deal. Business leaders know that the public and investors expect compliance, and their companies have reoriented their businesses away from carbon-based fuels. Business leaders are far more attuned to the benefits of U.S. international economic leadership than are Beltway anti-government ideologues. (“Two-thirds of respondents indicated that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord diminished America’s global standing. Another 86% expressed concern about Trump minimizing Russian security mischief.”)
Ideologues consider a dozen or so regulatory reversals as political nirvana. Chief executives want to know what the rules are and want government to make decisions more quickly. Anti-tax activists want to starve government of revenue (so as to shrink it) and have become entirely indifferent to the country’s massive debt. The business community has limited objectives — lower the top corporate rate, make repatriation of overseas money possible and remove tax expenditures that distort decision-making. Massive debt makes the markets jumpy, so a gusher of red ink spooks business leaders. (“Three-fourths of survey respondents said the administration’s budget proposal is not sound.”)
It’s also a matter of priorities. For business, especially the high-tech industry, it is far more important to have a functional immigration system and repaired infrastructure than it is to have another few points knocked off the top-margin individual tax rate. (For one thing, business leaders are really rich and know they can afford to keep paying at least what they have been since the expiration of a sliver of the George W. Bush tax cuts.)
One also suspects that chief executives of major public companies, who would suffer grievous financial and legal penalties for any public misrepresentations, understand the requirements of public accountability (to their boards and shareholders) and have absorbed the necessity of workplace anti-discrimination and diversity policies (with a few notable exceptions such as disgraced leaders at Fox News and Uber). They react with disdain and disgust to the boorish, undisciplined, ignorant and dishonest president. They rightly imagine that none of them could keep their jobs if they behaved as Trump does.
If this sounds like a replay of the clash between the developer’s son from Queens and the Manhattan elites, you’re onto something. The latter didn’t reject Trump because he came from Queens but because he was a loudmouthed carnival barker whose self-promotion far outstripped his accomplishments. Nothing much has changed — Trump surely has not. The resentment that fueled Trump’s revenge motive against elites is the natural reaction of a narcissist to those unimpressed with his act. (He would tell himself, “They are the problem, not me.”) In fact, to their credit, business and social elites who rejected Trump then and the chief executives who roll their eyes at him now long ago figured out that Trump is an incompetent phony, a moral slob and an economic know-nothing. Knowing that they know this just kills Trump.