Commentary: What Bill Ackman and other business titans don’t get about politics

They’re the smartest guys in the room, capable of making billions of dollars on arcane trades nobody else can spot. So why are some of the leading minds in business and investing so clueless about politics?

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman is currently inviting reviewers to critique the rationale for how he plans to vote in 2024. Okay, why not? Ackman joins Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and a bunch of other one percenters in publicly supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump in this year’s election.

Nothing wrong with that! Unless, um, you’re supporting Trump because you think he’ll be better for the economy, while conveniently ignoring multiple analyses forecasting higher inflation, larger budget deficits, and lower GDP growth under Trump than under his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Oct. 11, Ackman, a hedge fund manager who made much of his fortune from corporate activism, published a lengthy social media post listing 33 reasons he’s supporting Trump. They’re really reasons he opposes Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Democrats in general, with Ackman saying his 33 items “are the actions and policies that our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within.”

Before getting to Ackman’s list, it’s worth first delineating a few basic tenets of American politics that seem relevant:

Politicians say one thing and do another. This isn’t a Democratic thing or a Republican thing; it’s a feature of the American political system. Sometimes, politicians just lie. But sometimes they’re telling you what they would do with a giant asterisk that says, “If I get elected with a filibuster-proof partisan majority in Congress that will pass all my legislative priorities.”

That rarely happens. The last time one party could pass legislation without worrying about the Senate filibuster was in 1979. Even a simple majority in both houses can make it tough to pass the president’s favored bills. Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan failed in 2022, even though Biden’s Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. This is always how politicians explain away failed campaign promises they knew were never going to happen in the first place: The other party stood in the way.

Presidents aren’t the same as mayors. Party politics is very different at the city, state, and federal levels. Liberal and conservative politicians can sometimes push their agendas further in smaller jurisdictions that lean heavily one way or the other, such as San Francisco for liberals and Oklahoma City for conservatives. Presidents representing the country as a whole face much stronger pressure to hew toward the center.

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The party’s radical wing usually doesn’t run things. Presidential candidates usually pay lip service to the most radical members of their party to keep them in the “base.” But the far-left or far-right wings of each party usually support policies that aren’t popular with the general public, and any president who governs too far toward the fringe will suffer a collapse of approval.

Ackman’s items

Now for Ackman’s list and its flaws. Among other things, he equates some of the fringiest Democratic antics in the nation’s most liberal wards with a Biden-Harris administration that has been far more pragmatic. He takes old campaign promises at face value without doing a simple reality check to see if they ever happened. He also applies logic tests to Biden and Harris that Trump would fail as well.

On Ackman’s list of 33 items, for instance, 5, 6, 10, and 16 refer to some local Democratic efforts to decriminalize shoplifting and other petty crimes, tolerate disruptive protests, and “defund the police.” These are best understood as experimental and largely failed policy ideas that some local Democrats tried out, especially after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and legitimate protests against police brutality. These ideas have no traction at the national level.

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Ackman is basically tying Harris to some of the dumbest ideas in the most liberal parts of the country.

In item 7, Ackman frets about efforts to “limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking,” which is the revolutionary fossil fuel drilling technique that has led to a surge in US oil and natural gas production. If Ackman were scrutinizing a company he planned to invest in (or against), he’d probably read up on relevant statements by the CEO, then go a step further to see if the CEO actually did what he said he was going to do.

In 2019, Biden did say he wanted to “end fossil fuel.” Around the same time, Harris backed a ban on fracking. They’ve now been in charge for nearly four years. Did they do it?

Not even close.

Oil and gas production has hit new record highs during the Biden administration, and Biden himself has tacitly encouraged that, because he wants gasoline prices to fall. This is a classic instance of the candidates telling one wing of their party what they want to hear while, in reality, more or less letting the market call the shots.

Ackman’s biggest bugaboo (items 11, 12, 20, and 21) seems to be the elite universities that have tolerated anti-Israel protests since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and a few fringe Democrats who seem similarly inclined. Again, this is not Biden, whose stout support for Israel has made him far more popular there than in his home country, or Harris, who caught heat for not allowing a Palestinian-American a prominent speaking gig at the Democratic convention in August.

What the Biden administration has done, meanwhile, is fill Israeli warehouses with weapons and join Israel’s defense in helping shoot down drones and missiles during two Iranian aerial bombardments. Biden is now sending a valuable antimissile system to Israel, along with US troops to man it.

Not good enough, Bill?

Ackman does provide a few chuckles. He chides Biden’s handlers for allegedly concealing declines in Biden’s “cognitive health” (item 24), apparently unaware that his man Trump is now the one who seems to be suffering cognitive decline. Harris released her medical records on Oct. 12. Trump refuses to release his.

In item 2, Ackman complains about Biden policies that increased the national debt. Someone should tell him Trump’s plans would add another $7.5 trillion, compared with a mere $3.5 trillion for Harris’s plans.

Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen

Trump’s other billionaire backers aren’t so thorough in explaining their affinity for him. But they provide plenty of clues. The trio of tech bros, Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen, are cranky “techno-optimists” who want to bulldoze laws, rules, and social niceties out of the way to speed the apotheosis of smart machines. Trump is a tech troglodyte with a 1970s mindset, but the tech oligarchs may see that as an advantage: Trump is so unschooled on tech that he’s easily manipulable by whoever gains his trust. Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, is a Thiel protégé with connections to other Silicon Valley Trumpers, so Vance may be the conduit for the techno-optimists to influence Trump.

Musk has gone all in on Trump, with hopes of running a “government efficiency commission” in a second Trump term. What a fool’s errand that would be. Yes, the federal government is vast and inefficient. But that’s because Congress wants it that way. Every agency and department represents turf, budgets, and the power of the purse to some congressional committee and its members, who are not about to let Musk or any reformer carve up their fiefdoms. Many have tried. None have succeeded.

The tech oligarchs could probably persuade Trump to follow their lead on pet issues such as the deregulation of tech and crypto. But are they ready for the backlash? When industries get too much power, the people howl and somebody has to pay, even if the feds are complacent. State attorneys general often seize the initiative when the feds are quiescent, as they’ve done with Big Tobacco, opioid purveyors, and some tech firms, including TikTok.

The reality of a Harris presidency is that it wouldn’t be the communistic, anarchic free-for-all her worst critics imagine. It would mostly be a continuation of the status quo, which isn’t so bad. Inflation is nearly back to normal, stock markets are at record highs, gas for Ackman’s minivan is a manageable $3.20, and there’s no recession in sight.

The reality of a Trump presidency would be more trade wars, because one thing Trump can do without Congress is raise tariffs as much as he wants. He can also attempt a mass deportation effort without Congress, which he vows to do. Goldman Sachs and many other forecasters say those two Trump policies alone would bring higher inflation and lower GDP growth than we’d have under Harris.

If you’re a billionaire, maybe you don’t really care.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.

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