More Business Leaders Are Warming to Trump’s Pitch

In his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump is more open about his pro-business stance than he’s ever been, and some corporate leaders have been warming to his pitch. But his choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate complicates his newfound bond with big business.

But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic.

Dropping the Act

When Donald Trump first ran for president as a Republican, he didn’t get a warm response from the elite business world. In 2016, major business leaders shunned the self-styled real-estate mogul and threw their dollars behind Hillary Clinton, reacting in part to Trump’s vocal anti-corporate rants. The business world was similarly cold toward Trump in his first bid for reelection (at least in public), and many executives denounced the January 6 insurrection. Now some business leaders are open to the idea of a second Trump term.

In recent months, wealthy businesspeople have pledged their support to Trump. Several top Silicon Valley venture capitalists are planning to donate to a Trump-aligned super PAC. The Winklevoss twins, of The Social Network fame, donated $1 million worth of bitcoin apiece, though some was refunded. And at Davos earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon complimented several aspects of Trump’s first term (Trump said last month that he would consider Dimon as a future Treasury secretary).

Not every prominent executive is praising Trump, of course: For every CEO shouting about politics, many are saying nothing at all. As Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s business school, reminded me, Elon Musk is the only CEO in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 companies pledging support for Trump so far (and how much Musk will actually give is not yet clear). Others in the business world are not explicitly endorsing Trump but are simply contending with the current likelihood of his win: The so-called “Trump trade,” the frenzy of market betting in anticipation of a GOP victory in November, has reemerged over the past few weeks, as Biden’s debate flop and the assassination attempt boosted investors’ expectations that Trump will take back the presidency.

If Trump uses his power as president to weaken corporate regulations, as he has said he will, that could lead to boom times for certain companies, especially those in the tech sector. Some investors are also betting on industries such as domestic oil and (in a grim turn of events) private detention centers that could flourish under Trump’s aggressive approach to immigration.

But Trump 2.0 may not universally boost American corporations. Stocks of chip companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia fell yesterday after Bloomberg Businessweek published Trump’s suggestion that Taiwan should pay the United States for defense. And Trump’s new running mate has shown an openness to antitrust regulation, an isolationist approach, and an element of true economic populism that have raised alarm among business leaders. With J. D. Vance in office, a second Trump term might drift further from standard pro-business Republicanism.

Trump’s rhetoric has always been marked by a deep hypocrisy. He proclaims that he is a champion of the working class while advocating policies that would bolster the wealthiest Americans. Take, for example, his tariff plan: If he follows through on his promise to increase tariffs on foreign goods, the ultrarich would likely see lower tax rates, while the cost of living for the average American would rise. The theme of Monday night’s proceedings at the Republican National Convention (RNC) was “Make America Wealthy Again,” but the policies Trump has focused on would chiefly make America’s plutocrats wealthier. Though the GOP invited labor leaders such as Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak at the convention on Monday, Trump is likely to hammer unions (something he did his fair share of during his first term in office) and tilt the balance of power back to corporate bosses. Corporate America likes the sound of that.

Favoring the very rich has long been laced into Trump’s economic policies, but now he is starting to drop the populist act. During his first run, he was critical of big corporations: He accused multiple industries and companies of “getting away with murder” and initially suggested that his tax plan would hit the superrich hard (in fact, it did the opposite). As my colleague Rogé Karma wrote earlier this month, his posture has changed in his current campaign: “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power.” He’s rubbing elbows with well-known billionaires, telling wealthy Americans that more tax cuts are coming, and praising the crypto industry that he once accused of being scammy. Trump stands to benefit from the perception that business leaders are behind him, Sonnenfeld noted. It helps bolster the big-shot image the former president tries to cultivate—in Sonnenfeld’s words, the “Daddy Warbucks” persona.

Whatever Trump says onstage at the RNC tonight may inject further uncertainty into the stock market—and into the world. But for Trump’s supporters, the allure endures. Even in his campaign’s pro-business era, Trump is polling well with working-class voters. If Trump wins again, Rogé wrote, one powerful lesson will be that his “electoral success had more to do with his personal appeal to voters than with his unorthodox policy positions.”

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