Corporate leaders regularly praise the Trump administration and its policies in public. Behind closed doors, their mood is darker.
At a meeting of CEOs and other executives on Wednesday convened by the Yale School of Management, dozens of America’s business leaders sounded off on their concerns about tariffs, immigration, foreign policy matters and what many described as an increasingly chaotic, hard-to-navigate business environment.
“They’re being extorted and bullied individually, but in private discourse, they’re really upset,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who organized the event, referring to recent deals that give the U.S. government a cut of certain Nvidia chip sales and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel.
The meeting included prominent corporate executives such as Motorola Solutions Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown, who also received an award for leadership; Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel; and Ethan Allen CEO Farooq Kathwari. Other attendees included the heads of major manufacturers, consumer brands, automakers, technology companies and investment firms. Many who shared their concerns Wednesday in the confines of a private conference room didn’t want to speak publicly for fear that their companies could be targeted by the administration or that they could attract criticism from Trump.
In a series of poll questions, the executives in the room made their frustrations known. Asked if tariffs had been helpful or hurtful to their businesses, 71% of respondents described the levies as harmful. Another question centered on the legality of tariffs. About three quarters of respondents said courts were correct in saying the tariffs are illegal as executed.
The Supreme Court will soon consider Trump’s claim that a statute that does not mention tariffs gives him the power to impose tariffs as high as he chooses, on any country he chooses, for any reason he chooses, for as long as he chooses. About this claim, congressional Republicans are supine, because of fear or adoration. Congressional Democrats are dumbfounded by the president’s exercise of powers their party was complicit in Congress forfeiting.
So, unsurprisingly, there is tepid congressional questioning of the president’s actions as judge, jury and executioner in the waters off Venezuela. His behavior is predictable.
Given his capacious notion of presidential powers, in domestic and foreign affairs. And given Vance’s disdain for Americans “weeping over the lack of due process” for people swept from U.S. streets and workplaces into Alligator Alcatraz and similar confinements because they are suspected members of criminal gangs. And given the president’s penchant for declaring this and that (e.g., a trade deficit) to be an “emergency.” And given that he learned opportunistic verbal extravagance (e.g., an “invasion” at the southern border) from progressives who tried to disqualify him from the 2024 election because the afternoon riot of Jan. 6, 2021, supposedly qualified as an “insurrection” under the 14th Amendment.
Trump also departs markedly from the past GOP playbook in his lack of recognition that the market allocates resources much better than politicians and bureaucrats do. He treats the market as a stage for negotiation to reorganize the world’s economies. Old-guard Republicans were globalists, whereas Trump built his appeal on “America First” nationalism and protectionism.
Earlier Republicans valued predictable rules, but as Cambridge legal scholar Antara Haldar noted in a Project Syndicate symposium this month assessing the direction of “Trumponomics,” the president “is willing to break any rule, norm, or promise…in the name of striking ad hoc corporate-style ‘deals.'” Where conservative-minded leaders of the past obscured the state’s role, Trump “flaunts it.”
Yet Haldar correctly argues that Trump’s approach differs from other forms of heavy-handed state control. It is neither the Chinese model nor that of the developmental state. It is “erratic, transactional, and short-sighted” and a rejection of the “quietly overbearing ‘Nanny State’…in favor of a commanding, patriarchal ‘Daddy State.'”
Democrats are up in arms over Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s use of regulatory power to silence critics of Donald Trump, and they’re right. But they’d have more credibility if they admitted their own recent attempts to expand federal power over the media, the web and political speech.
In laws passed last century, the FCC has broad power to regulate broadcasters that use the public airwaves. License holders are required by law to operate in the “public interest,” however regulators define it, and the FCC must determine that transfers of licenses are in the public interest. Mr. Carr is using this leverage to pressure broadcasters to toe the Administration’s line and drop critics like Jimmy Kimmel.
“We’re going to hold these broadcasters accountable to the public interest,” Mr. Carr said Thursday on Fox News. “And if broadcasters don’t like that simple solution, they can turn their license into the FCC.” Eleven Senate Democrats condemned Mr. Carr for trying to “act as the speech police and force broadcasters to adopt political viewpoints that you favor.”
How quickly memories fade. When Democrats controlled the White House, they argued for giving the FCC additional power to police speech by expanding its writ to cable networks and broadband providers. They claimed to want to prevent discrimination and what they called misinformation. The latter is what censors on the right call Mr. Kimmel’s comments.
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Rohit Chopra, an Elizabeth Warren acolyte who led the Biden Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, proposed in 2018 a Public Integrity Protection Agency. Regulators in that agency would be empowered to “inspect and investigate individuals and companies seeking to influence federal officials,” including think tanks and nonprofits.
All of these ideas are dangerous for free speech, which is why we oppose them. Imagine how Mr. Trump could have used these powers and agencies to harass and silence opponents. No business would be safe from his speech police, including newspapers.
If Democrats really care about a threat to the First Amendment and democracy from regulators and a willful President, they’d stop trying to give them more power and instead limit the power the FCC now has.
Iain Murray explains “why the old left–right divide no longer works.” A slice:
What appears to have happened is that this historical philosophical divide has become a major factor in world politics. The divide between national conservative and freedom conservative isn’t between nationalist and non-nationalists — as already mentioned, both camps believe strongly in the nation — but between teleocratic and nomocratic visions of the state.
The national conservative generally believes that the state has a unifying purpose, whether it be to promote the interests of the American worker above all else, to preserve American communities by restricting immigration, or to promote the “common good” in morals and the economy. All these are teleocratic ends.
Interestingly, in this they share something in common with a former prominent conservative faction that they despise, the neoconservatives, who believed that America had a national purpose in policing the world. For instance, Irving Kristol, the grandfather of neoconservatism, believed that America should have an “imperial role,” saying, “I think it would be natural for the United States … to play a far more dominant role in world affairs … to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that.”
