This piece combines a question and a command, i.e. both “why are businesses cowering?” and “knock it off!”
Surely the same two apply equally well to Republican politicians, and the question in their case is even more baffling. Why are they cowering? What threats, exactly, have kept them in line? What is Murkowski hinting at? There has been a persistent murmur, since Trumps first regime and especially in the aftermath of Jan 6, that Republican politicians are literally in fear for their lives if they cross Trump. Not merely in fear for their political futures, but for their lives and the lives of their families.
How are these threats delivered? Why are they credible? Whom do the threateners point to as an example of the dire consequences? Has any wayward Republican really fallen out of a window? I’m not aware of it.
There is a strange undercurrent of deep terror that does not seem matched by actual events. But unfortunately, terror is effective, even when ungrounded, unless people wake up and knock it off.
Yes, your point about the fear is what really gets me to the point of spitting rage. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds by this point, of people who have testified against Trump in various court proceedings (about as adversarial a situation as you can get) who are all still walking around free and in perfect health, so why do people keep acting like it's obvious and routine that Trump *literally* has his enemies killed?!? Grow an 'effing spine people!
The only Republicans with balls are women. Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah Griffin etc. Adam Kinziger is the one outlier. Not even Ben Sasse has guts out of office.
"...fear of their staffers. GOP politicians are in constant fear...."
No, I don't think this gets at it. Politicians are always afraid that their voters will vote them out of office. But there's some new weird dynamic here, whereby Republicans are in literal fear for their lives. They only hint at the seriousness, and don't divulge details. But it's clear that they are getting repeated, credible threats that genuinely terrify them away from opposing Trump.
Dem politicians are afraid that their staffers will say that they are old and uncool, not that they will kill them. Any attempt at equivalence obscures more than it reveals.
I also don't get why we discount what happened on J6 when evaluating whether legislature's concerns/fears are reasonable. They were literally all herded into secure rooms by an armed police force while an angry mob stormed their offices with such murderous intent that the Secret Service literally shot one of them. It feels a bit like saying "I don't get why you're worried about being shot. You were shot at last year but your bullet proof vest stopped the bullet. Sure, the shooter still has his guns and all his bullets, but he's not actively pointing a gun at you right this second." Being uninjured when someone tries to injure you doesn't make your concerns about being attacked unreasonable.
I'm sorry, but if any one of us had that happen in our offices then I don't think anyone would be lecturing us on whether our safety concerns were reasonable when the group that did the attack had literally only gained in power since the original attack. We would all be agreeing that the fears are at least understandable.
They’re not afraid of Trump killing them. They are afraid of crazy people feeling empowered by the political moment to kill. There’s a reason Trump was shot at too, and it’s more closely related to RFK and Twitter than to Trump himself.
Haven't they always received them? I am not sure to what degree anti-abortion and pro-gun violence was actually a real problem but there was at least a perception it was and lots if death threats issued.
Powerful people get threatened all the time (and for centuries - this ain't new) - politicians or not. That's not an excuse for not doing your job. Maybe don't be a politician if you can't handle that.
>But there's some new weird dynamic here, whereby Republicans are in literal fear for their lives. They only hint at the seriousness, and don't divulge details. But it's clear that they are getting repeated, credible threats that genuinely terrify them away from opposing Trump.
I've read a few articles asserting this is the case, but they're always anonymously-sourced and full of ambiguous quotes that don't necessarily support the editorialized headlines. Can you link whatever you think is the most compelling article demonstrating the reality of the trend you describe?
My gut reaction has been, and remains, to discount these articles as wishful thinking motivated by a desire to find some other explanation for Trump's iron grip on the GOP beyond his popularity with GOP voters and his proven ability to destroy the careers of Republican politicians.
Fair, but Romney was talking about two very specific votes in the immediate aftermath of a violent attack on the Capitol wherein the anonymous politicians Romney talked to were themselves at risk.
Ordinarily, you would expect the fear of physical harm to fade with time and an absence of additional incidents. My inclination is to believe that it *has* very much faded and that fear of physical harm plays only a very small role, if any, in the present abject subservience of GOP politicians.
Perhaps you are right that Allan meant that GOP pols are afraid that their voters will kill them. But then there is still no equivalency with Dem staffers, who are at worst going to frown sanctimoniously and wag their fingers at you.
no I meant that not giving absolute deference to Dear Leader will cause GOP pols to get voted out immediately. Not a physical fear (though I suppose that could be the case)
That’s not a good solution. We already have a lot of bad selection effects on who runs for office. Asking people not to run if they have normal reactions to death threats means it’s only an even weirder set who bother.
Which Dem politicians from the last cohort have most recently demonstrated their commitment to this narrative? All I got is Bidens and Pelosis. I recall Schumer making an important judgement call, but as far as I know, he's still in office.
I'm personally thinking Lina Khan and Gary Gensler will have to lead the corporate renegotiation, likely working w/ David Sachs. I could see those three coming up w/ a new "Contract w/ The Global Investing Community in American Assets". We'll need Lael Brainard and Summers to sanctify this from an academic perspective. JPow and the rest of the rest Fed can just largely ignore this for at least a year or two, regardless of what Trump says, as long as it's reasonably aligned w/ this new contract. May take a decade or two for that to be ancient history. Like just another chapter in the Global Financial Crisis and another Tooze book.
I think the original error of opposition to Trump from every corner, not just the partisan side you'd expect, has been a crazed apocalypticism when the reality is that he's a farcical ass. People like that do real damage with real consequences and that has happened and will continue to happen. However at some point it's more effective to treat him as an unfit buffoon rather than constantly telling everyone they should be shaking in their boots.
More than anything they need to read more about Latin America and less about Germany and Russia. There are many Trump like figures in Latin America who were corrupt and centralised power without being anything like Putin.
That's a good comment and I think there's a weird reticence about understanding America as a New World country that in some ways has more in common with Latin America than Europe, even though we have historically been (and will probably mostly continue to be) a European diaspora nation.
But the truth is in between - Trump isn't Hitler, but he's not just a buffoon with empty bluster this time around. The real threat is something like Franco, Mussolini, or a Latin American dictatorship, which is still very bad and legitimately frightenting.
Ah, I see. I could definitely be persuaded that this would've been the right approach to take during the election itself when Trump was on the ballot, be deflating enthusiasm among his supporters and keeping swing voters within reach. I'm not sure whether or not it mobilizes opposition, especially going into the midterms.
Well said. Calling people fascists, nazis, etc. just doesn't change any type of behavior and rolls off the intended targets backs at this point. Extreme language somehow has minimal effect since it's everywhere, especially if you're particularly online. Clutching pearls and scolding simply doesn't work. Harvard's way of publicly digging in is much more effective as Matt points out.
I can't speak for the threats angle, but just on political incentives- very few Republicans are going to stay in office if they defy Trump. There was some statistic going around the other week about how a huge majority of the House now was elected after 2016, so they really have no memory of a pre-Trump Republican party. And just practically- there's very very little angle to stay in office as a Trump-defying Republican. It's not just primaries- almost no districts have enough voters that will say 'hey I disagree with Trump but I still want to vote Republican'. If the voters in your district disagree with Trump enough, they're just going to vote for a Democrat. There are no incentives to vote independently
Alternative theory: they're actually fine with what Trump is doing but saying so outright might garner looks of pity and scorn from people they want some smidgen of approval from.
Thus they need a plausible explanation for their acquiescence.
My understanding is the threats come from crazed Trump supporters, and are for disturbing acts of violence. You say no Republican has fallen out a window, but a congressman was shot at a softball game, a presidential candidate was shot giving a speech, and the Capitol was invaded by a mob calling for the lynching of various political figures. And yes, only the last of those came from Trump followers, but the vibe is “there are a lot of crazies, they’re screaming at us, keep your head down.”
You’re looking for Putin-style actions, but it’s random political violence that’s the fear.
Except: that was a one-off threat by a fairly disorganized mob. It would be easy for anyone to discount it -- especially when you are part of a party devoted to pretending nothing happened on Jan. 6. What is the sustained level of detailed threats in the years following that which have made it seem credible?
Trump got shot. Scalise got shot. Giffords got shot. There was a plot to kidnap Whitmer. Reagan was almost killed. The entire Kennedy family - except Ted & RJK, Jr... - appears to be snakebit.
Politicians are threatened all the time. Do you job despite that or quit politics. It's fine.
I think it ultimately just comes down to the reality that for all their machismo and bluster about guns, etc., conservative politicians and businessmen are cowards and tools. They only mock and despise Biden because they know that he would never harm them - and because they are encouraged by their in-group to do so. But take away that safety...
I think the threats aren't organized, but they are definitely there coming from the MAGA politic. Romney hires his own security for his family and him. Murkowski gives voice to what is happening. No one knows how credible the threats are just that they are happening.
No one wants to be the first Paul Pelosi on the Republican side.
We know of at least one case-- the DOGE whistleblower had a threat and candid photographs of him out walking his dog taped to his office door after he reported.
Would not be surprising if others have had threats that successfully silenced them.
I think it's overwhelming fear of primary challenges, and fear of losing post-office professional opportunities (I'd imagine lobbying gigs and wingnut welfare are harder to get if you've been blackballed by half the political establishment). There's also the possibility of lawfare and IRS audits.
But sure, the fact that keeping your head down might keep you and your family safer from freelance right wing terrorism is an added value. There's only a hint of violence at this point, but a hint can still be powerful, and Trump himself has frequently used rhetoric that appears to encourage his more extreme supporters to engage in violence against his political enemies.
My general sense is that it's less "believing he's a dictator" and more "being paralyzed by uncertainty."
This is such a *weird* administration, with half of the figures total cranks. Everything moves fast and changes all the time. It's hard to figure out what the President is committed to and what's trolling or a weird passing whim. His approval ratings change quickly.
Businesses which fancy themselves strategic are having a hard time figuring out what the strategic choice is right now.
I have a buddy who works at peloton and they have a whole team dedicated to decoding Trump's tariff policies. Seems like they should just get an astrologist.
I think this is where Howard Lutnick comes in. Seemingly every few days he makes some pronouncement that progress on tariffs is happening, market booms that day on the news…and nothing happens.
I asked the other day why Matt thinks the market skyrocketed last week and the fact the market booms every time Lutnick hints that tariffs might be slightly lessened is a big data point to me that Wall Street/Big Business (or enough people in positions of power) have made a bet tariffs will be fully lifted and to “believe” Lutnick. Now my suspicion is every time Lutnick says something like this and nothing happens should eventually make this a “boy who cried wolf” situation. But for now it seems best explanation is a whole lot of people who think “hey once Americans see empty shelves and complain enough, he’ll definitely back off then”. And…they might be right.
Why are the markets moving? There is a huge amount of hot money floating around looking for outsized gains. They have been basically making money since the recovery after 2008. So the market is super saturated with vibe investing by people who can't read a balance sheet or decipher corporate strategy. And to call them investors is really a stretch. I am sure many of these people didn't understand tariffs when they were voting but they do understand there is still money to be made in the short run as the overall market gyrates to each statement.
The other thing I noted in my question to Matt as to why market went up more than it seemingly should have recently is I speculated the number of retail investors has only ballooned in the past 5-10 years to the point that they can move markets in a way not possible even 2008.
But I think to follow up my point is I think we underestimate how many "elite" investors have drunk the conservative "kool-aid" as well. This predates Trump. My lodestar for this take is John Paulson the hedge fund manager. He's one of the Wall Street titans who became famous for shorting the market in 2007...and make an absolute fortune as a result. So for awhile he became a bit of a go to "guru". When in fact it seems like he started imbibing lots of right wing media and started mouthing off that inflation and hyper inflation was around the corner. Except the real key here is that he put his money where is mouth was. He clearly believed this to be true despite very little actual evidence this was going to happen. And result was pretty major losses at a time when he should have been posting major gains. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstv4vjyrgcjjhjdi1a8/corner-office/in-speaking-out-john-paulson-decides-the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense
Was a real "canary in the coal mine" for me regarding right of center elites; that and Scalia's dissent in Lawrence vs Texas (the language he used in that dissent was the language of someone clearly listening to too much right wing talk radio).
It is very much vibe investing. A large amount of the investment flow is not using a objective measures. Just look at Tesla, it is up $100 from a year ago. Is there a rational case that they are $100 more valuable than a year ago? Or at one point $200 higher than today. As someone who sees occasional clips of CNBC and Fox Business, there is a weird ignoring of the ultra high valuation in the market and that the vast majority of the risk is downside. I think it would have broken by now except the limited of options for a safe US haven for people's funds.
But many companies are also applying "tall poppy syndrome:" the poppy that stands taller is the one that gets chopped down. Even when they believe fighting is wise, they (not irrationally) conclude that the first to fight will, at best, achieve a pyrrhic victory.
Yeah, and they feed on each other. Like, if Trump declares he's going to do something stupid, as he does multiple times a week, and you're trying the calculus of, "Do I potentially earn his ire by standing up and saying that this is stupid," you then have this additional calculus of, "And is this even in any way real? Like, if I don't do anything will it just vanish in two days?"
When have you ever known a businessman to be too paralyzed by uncertainty to speak their mind? You're talking about businessmen as if they're scientists. The latter prefers precision, the former prefers clout.
Despite the worries and concerns business leaders have about Trump's actions -- and they have real concerns as Matt rightly notes -- I don't think you can overestimate how worried they were about the 2018-2024 Democratic Party. SEC proposals around Climate Change; the codifying of DEI, hostility to businesses at the FTC and the migration of culture war battlegrounds from the campuses into the workplace were all real fears. (The Common Sense Democrat Manifesto will go a long way to alleviating those fears in 2028.) Importantly, changes during those years were in areas where business leaders were unsure of what to do. And they hate, hate, hate not knowing what to do!
Most of the threats from Trump are about increasing input costs. Business leaders know how to adapt, change and compete in that area. So, though they don't like what Trump is doing, they believe they know how to act. Read through a few Q1 earnings transcripts and you will see that almost all companies are saying something similar: "We will use a combination of pricing actions, cost reductions and sourcing strategies to maintain competitiveness". They have a playbook so they spend their time running their plays rather than complaining about the changing rules.
Destroying trade and supply chains is much worse for businesses than “codifying DEI” or whatever. This is not serious. Rather the business community is hopeful for something changing. But it’s not just input costs, it’s exports, it’s business certainty, it’s consumer sentiment and supply and demand.
I didn't say this was *smart* of businessmen - if you want to do gross shit and get canceled because people are more attuned to bad behavior due to wokeness/DEI being salient, that does have consequences for your career and personal income. Obviously the correct solution is don't be a womanizer or a racist asshole, but if you *are* one, then it makes sense to be more concerned about people having the nerve to call you on it than about your golden parachute being downgraded to a silver one on account of "broader macro conditions".
The part of “DEI” that’s existentially concerning here is that your workforce, hiring, promotions, etc. are expected to be representative of overall US demographics without regard to how credentials, aptitude, skills, and experience in the relevant fields are distributed.
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
i.e, no, in a lot of cases, it's not liberation from actual quotas or actual requirements about running your business, it's liberation from people calling you on your shit.
"your workforce, hiring, promotions, etc. are expected to be representative of overall US demographics"
Also, what's the "or else" here? Because I think the "or else" is "people will be mad at me online or they'll try to stage a boycott that doesn't go anywhere".
A lot of DEI and woke stuff is annoying, but if you want to go around thinking of yourself as a business titan maybe you should buck up, make decisions best for your business as you see them, ride out any resulting fits thrown by the blue-haired progressive crowd, and not be a sniveling, whiny little coward who needs to feel validated in everything they do to the point where you back a wannabe Pinochet for president.
Is this like just a hypothetical or does this represent some survey of CEOs? I really don’t think for most executives “cancellation” for sex or racism was the major animating dispute for them. Instead they thought Trump 2 was going to be tax cuts and light touch regulation. Despite legions of information to the contrary they just got it really really wrong
My sense is that The Common Sense Democrat Manifesto doesn't necessarily exclude Lina Khan and Gary Gensler. It just doesn't make them the center piece of your politics.
Part of me thinks they are waiting for someone to make the first move, and when Trump’s ability to punish their pushback is shown to be impotent they are going to go all Ides of March on Trump.
From past comments I understand you to be in a business-facing field of finance, but... this is a several-orders-of-magnitude understatement to the problems of sourcing and business planning that your clientele are facing right now.
If they aren't panicking, it is because they have either reached the "acceptance" stage of mourning, or they expect last-second deals before substantial pain is felt.
If they thought that the Democratic policy plan for business circa 2020 primaries was worse for them than whatever *this* is, I really don't know what to say.
I think there is an interesting cultural and historical question embedded here. In the 1920s, business and business people (and rich people generally) were lionized, only to fall hard from grace post-1929. And, broadly, from 1932 until Reagan, business was treated as just another interest group - a disliked interest group under pre-WWII FDR ("I welcome their hatred"), an actively cultivated interest group under Eisenhower, a warily approached but not necessarily hostilely regarded interest group under JFK and LBJ; a surprisingly remote and not terribly beloved interest group under Nixon - but in all instances, a legitimate interest group, but one held at greater or lesser degrees of arms' length. No CEO would have particularly expected to have his self-worth, social contribution or sense of purpose validated by the president or, really, by much of any politician. Since the age of Reagan, by contrast, business leaders have gotten re-accustomed to being lionized, consulted, treated like bigshots, over-praised as "job creators", treated in the mainstream discourse as sort-of semi-immune from criticism. How much was the extremely negative reaction to Biden - which I agree was very definitely A Thing - something that came from a rather petulant and childlike reaction to not having one's collective behind kissed as a class? Biden was, in this telling, a reversion to the pre-Reaganite norm (an era which, of course, was formative to his career as a politician!), and frankly, it feels objectively disproportional to me for business to have decided to caricature Biden as if he were the equivalent of Salvador Allende or Chavez or some such, just because business got treated at arms' length and not otherwise as a privileged class for four years, and the government looked at antitrust and other regulatory initiatives that wouldn't have looked unusual in the 1960s or 70s.
Yes, yes, yes - policies can be bad for business, but the C-suite is insulated from those effects, because they can pass through price increases and to the extent the business struggles, it's understood to not be their fault - and if they do lose their jobs, they've got the resources to not hit rock bottom and enter the underclass like their workers might. What Democrats struggle with (because it's annoying and unwarranted) is fawning over a business class full of people who fancy themselves the next John Galt when they're actually people with a somewhat above-average ability to manage people and coordinate projects.
My deepest fear about 2028 is that despite having the shadow Elizabeth Warren administration, most voters believe they got Joe Biden, and thus a real lead pipe wielding lefty can still argue real progressivism has never been tried and now more than ever and might break thru, to similar damaging effect.
Most Democratic party voters think Biden did a good job governing, and I'm always a little confused by the punditry that Democrats are going to throw him under the bus for catering to the groups. After all, the groups simply are the formal organizing apparatus of the Democratic party's policy interests. It'd be like suggesting Heritage can be thrown under the bus overnight; who is going to pick up the rest of the staffing in a GOP admin?
Trump is president because he throws Heritage, et al, under the bus whenever he finds it convenient and the conservatives just take it without complaint when it happens.
Sure, and Trump still had no problem publicly throwing them under the bus whenever convenient. These are not mutually exclusive.
The difference is Trump literally can and will not only say no, but essentially put them out of business on a whim. He controls the party and Heritage does his bidding or it’s out in the cold with no political juice whatsoever and both sides know it.
Heritage and other GOP groups et al in 2016 surely still sought maximalist positions on entitlement reform, abortion, and gay marriage. And many of the groups including the GOP itself sought a reset to more welcoming rhetoric on immigration. Donald Trump did precisely the inverse on every account to immense political success. The groups of the right don't appear to mind such heresy!
And yet Heritage has demanded major Medicaid cuts that now seem likely to be implemented. Roe v. Wade is gone thanks to Supreme Court appointments. And we still don't know what's going to happen to gay marriage.
"Most Democratic party voters think Biden did a good job governing," this is precisely my fear. Democratic Party voters don't see the problem, but normal voters sure do.
Normal voters may begin to see things differently when Trump solves none of the problems they had under Biden while bringing on a recession and a new problem—unemployment going up, as it does in every recession.
I don't think it's accurate to call the Groups the formal organizing apparatus of the Democratic Party's policy interests. They are separate interest group orgs with their own institutional interests, notably they maintain influence with the constant threat of defection. Of course, there's also a giant issue with principal-agent problem with the groups between the organizations and people they supposedly represent.
On the point I am not sure you're correct about the view of the Biden Admin. Democratic voters are mad, mainly from losing to Trump again. I don't think there's a lot of strongly approve people in terms of Biden. But, there's not a consensus on what went wrong, which is mired in the usual factional disagreements.
If Harris runs again she's likely to get from both sides, even though she would be the front runner.
As of April 27th, YouGov found Democrats among US registered voters view Biden favorably by 81.4% to 16.8%[1]. As of their last poll asking on January 19th, YouGov found Democrats approved of Biden's job as president by 86.9% to 10.6%[2]. Democrats overwhelmingly view the former president favorably and think he did a good job as president. This is what Democrats thought in January, at the peak of Trump's honeymoon with approval among voters. As Trump (likely) maintains his mid-to-low 40s approval today or potentially falls further, I doubt Democrats will revise their approval of Biden's job downward.
Now as for the groups (or "Warren staffers", whichever term we prefer for labeling "people who staff and influence Democratic administrations",) these heavily informed Biden's decision-making on a variety of policy issues, including the economy and immigration which Gallup found as the most important issues in this election[3]. Here is an example[4] of the groups praising Susan Rice's departure in 2023 from the Biden admin because they dislike her desired policies on immigration to deter minors entering the US.
Personally, I put too much stock in 2020 in the idea Democrats would rethink their trajectory on the immigration issue in light of Trump's narrow loss due to the COVID issue. They instead went in the direction (if not always the details) of what policy people in the party wanted, which meant record immigration through the asylum court backload. I've learned my lesson of what to expect from their future administrations.
I don't think overall approval is all that indicative in the factional fight context. The Pew numbers have consistently given Biden weak "strong approval" numbers from Democrats and Dem leaners since 2022. One third in this survey from 2024.
It's worse than that. The energy for opposing Trump and the Republicans will mostly come from the progressive side because they're the ones with the most passion, and this will give them a leg up in 2028.
On one hand, when it comes to rank and file right-of-center *voters*, I think this comment is dead on.
On the other hand, when it comes to *businesses*, I have to think that anyone involved in any decisions in a business who have seen the tariffs have, no matter how much they disliked the Biden administration, gone "holy sh-t this is a different thing."
Maybe I'm underplaying it, but Lena Kahn just isn't global trade-war levels of scary. (I think this in particular because I think the risk of stagflation due to a trade war is very real and that's going to result in a fiscal crisis. The down-sides here are generationally bad.)
With that in mind, I think there is an element of truth here. If the democrats were going in with Obama era policies and not Biden era policies, "business is afraid of the left" wouldn't even be a thing.
To the extent that a bunch of people in the comments are poo-poo-ing this idea, I think part of that is the sort of weird bate-and-switch aspect of the Biden administration. We voted for the old catholic white guy over the lefties to tack to the center to beat trump, and then got an administration to the left of the Obama, run by progressives.
How much of this was the business community actually viewing Obama as anti-business and how much was Schwarzman just being a total rich asshole? Like...I look back at how Obama treated wall-street and think "y'all got off so easy...one fin-reg bill passed, a bail-out, and basically no one of consequence went to jail?"
Perhaps the circle can be squared by two things: (1) a trade war hits everyone whereas antitrust is targeted and (2) it's possibly to curry favor with this administration, thereby providing another avenue to get one up on your competitors. Of course, this may just be an attempt at rationalizing the irrational.
I realized after I posted that John used "were", and I think he's not wrong that business leaders thought Biden/Kahn were worse than their predicted Trump 2.0...it's just their predictions were off base because now he does the things he thinks up.
I think the big difference in vocality is about vengence. Anti-trust is targeted, but Biden wasn't calling up Lena Kahn and saying "so and so said mean shit about me in the NYT, go kill their merger." Trump is always out for payback at all times...he publicy says out loud what he'd like to do as payback even when it's obviously so out of bounds that people go "I can't believe he said that."
Or maybe they're just passing the tenth floor after having fallen from the twentieth floor and no real harm so far so just stick with the plan.
I remember the "confidence fairy" back in the day. Presumably, businesses like some kind of stability so they can plan for the future. To see one guy toy with the entire global economic system daily on a whim has to be the greatest threat they've ever faced. Yes -- stay with me here please -- possibly even more than the codifying of DEI.
But don’t businesses need to plan? To commit to a course of action? The biggest problem as I understand it is businesses (like everyone else) being unable know what they need to do because they never know what Trump will do tomorrow.
It's wrong when people assume that disliking Trump's policies implies accepting Biden's.
What concerns me today is when businesses forgo taking action against the administration that is the right thing to do for their business only because they are worried about retribution.
I mean, I think you're absolutely right - well-off businessmen would prefer an economic collapse due to a trade war over the worry they might have to pay higher taxes, their workers might actually have more power and leverage than they like, and people that don't treat them like the Masters of the Universe are in control.
I think one of the issues is many (prob not most) C suite ppl (including partners at those law firms) are very risk averse and short sighted to jump on to make a decision that might seem lucrative in short term - in a sense, they are like NFL HCs who can’t call 4th down gamble even if analytics call for it.
They seem to forget the structure of this game (in a game theory sense) is repetitive.
The good news though is those law firms seem to be punished by Microsoft as well as incoming law school students at prestigious law schools
"Very risk averse and short sighted" also explains "woke capital" a few years back. They don't take political positions out of principle, but they will side with what seems popular this quarter or avoids immediate, visible backlash.
I think part of this is the sense that, heavily informed by Trump 1, Nothing Ever Happens, especially when Trump is president. For some reason the pandemic has been largely assigned to Democrats and Biden. Until people start really feeling actual pain explicitly under the rule of Donald John Trump, there's a suspension of disbelief in elite circles, especially business circles.
Trump has been far more effective in creating second order effects for perceived disloyalty to the Administration. The BigLaw settlements are the best example. The firms didn’t settle because of the cost of litigating or fear of losing. They capitulated because Trump made it clear he would target their clients, and their clients made it known to the firms that they would choose different firms rather than becoming collateral damage. Which is entirely sensible from the perspective of each individual business-the administration has the capacity to seriously hurt any business in America. AT&T destroyed Trump’s DOJ in court during the last administration, and it cost them tens of millions of dollars. And that was a far more restrained DOJ that wasn’t going all in on a slash and burn strategy of attacking Trump’s enemies in the courts, in a judiciary that wasn’t nearly as dominated by Trump appointees, etc. The lesson? It’s just better not to be a target.
Add in the fact that Trump has essentially turned the federal government into a protection racket where he alone decides who gets taxed what on tariffs, who has to follow the securities laws law or not, etc., and any business large enough to draw his attention feels the need to be in line to pay tribute.
It’s very bad. It is the most troubling thing of the first 100 days as you say. But it is very, very difficult to solve because the Republican Party has fully embraced the corruption and there are no longer any meaningful institutional levers that matter to the public.
Trump's actions in this regard work as long as people believe he can carry out his threats. So they self-deter. If, somehow, his threats prove empty, then the whole house of cards could fall.
One thing that will help is his increasing unpopularity. Over time, he'll appear weaker, and people will be more willing to buck him. But someone has to be the first to go.
Sure, but the reality is that Trump needs very little public popularity to cause serious harm to businesses he dislikes. The regulatory state he controls can take a pound of flesh almost at will, even if it proves legally wrong.
Sure. And they might win some. And have their merger delayed by 2-3 years. Or spend $50 million in attorney fees. Or have regulatory approvals withheld elsewhere. Or they can deal with none of that and not be a target. Most businesses will choose not to be a target.
Reality is that you only need significant government capacity to do regulation well. You can get away with petty, vindictive regulatory enforcement on a shoestring budget because of the money for a well functioning system goes to finding the correct targets of enforcement.
One possibility for at least some of these businessmen is that they support Trump's overall political project and therefore are willing to take some hits personally in order to be good team players and maximize that project's likelihood of success.
I’ve said before that Matt is way too invested in the “CEOs are actually very smart people” theme. And my point isn’t to say CEOs are dumb or got to their position by failing upward which is the original intent of his point. But rather, just because CEOs are usually pretty smart and capable, doesn’t mean they aren’t susceptible to propaganda.
Again there is the famous South African example (to semi quote Rick James, Ketamine is a hell of a drug). But even beyond that CEOs by and large have been a center right voting constituency historically. Wall Street Journal editorial page (I’d venture most popular place CEOs get political opinions) has been admirably trashing tariffs last few months but for the most part last 8 years have been Trump sycophants. But I think Matt would be surprised how many of these guys (and it’s almost all guys) are probably imbibing lots Fox and even OWN
I mean we’ve seen this with law enforcement. We’ve seen cops make claims about fentanyl and crime that are odds with their actual lived experience (as an extreme example of this; see Eric Adams claiming crime was worse in 2022 than when he was a cop in the 80s). Why wouldn’t this applies to CEOs*
* time to open a can of worms. Yes there was an uptick in retail shoplifting in 2021. Far left was wrong to deny this. But honestly, how much of countermeasures are an overreaction by people who watched too much Fox News
There are a lot of CEOs who are also really smart on the very specific job of "make this type of widget/service and deliver it to customers" and have little understanding of the world outside of that, but think they have a deeply-informed worldview.
Among the thousands of "how trump won" or "how could so many people vote for Trump" think pieces, I think it remains underrated the extent a large number of voters think Trump is some super competent businessman and therefore must have the skills to be President. I mean this precedes Trump; this was a huge part of the base case for GWB and Romney to be President. The government is like a business so therefore you need some CEO type to run the business. Which is very mistaken, but I think makes a lot of intuitive sense even to a decent number of voters who voted for Clinton, Biden and Harris.
This is related to my take that Mark Burnett deserves A LOT of credit/blame for Trump's reputation. I think we underrate the extent to which people think "reality" tv is "real". That these are accurate pictures of the people on these shows despite the fact these shows are extremely deceptively edited and even scripted to give a very particular vision of the various characters (and yes they are characters). And on "The Apprentice", they made Trump look like the most decisive and successful businessman imaginable.
Trump really is a character from TV even more than from social media. It’s hard to understand how much delay there is in various forms of media impacting politics.
This is pretty much captured in the bifurcated approach of the Wall Street Journal: the news side is straight down the middle and reliable and the editorial pages provide the mindless propaganda that apparently businessmen like to read to give their brain a vacation from having to think.
"I’ve said before that Matt is way too invested in the “CEOs are actually very smart people” theme."
I've seen you mention this before, but it seems the same as saying someone is too invested in the "academics are actually very smart people" theme. Both academics and CEOS are very likely to be smart people. But smart ≠ correct on any given issue! Your second point stands on its own: plenty of smart people are blinded/influenced by their biases, preferences, assumptions, news sources, social circles, etc. whether they be CEOs or academics.
It's actually one of the reasons I found it so amazing so much attention is paid to people like Gender Studies professors. Like not only from the standpoint that very few students actually take these classes that get outsized attention. But also, like why does anyone think these professors would have sharp insights into economics or political strategy or any more so then..well..CEOs? Like on the specific topics of feminism, I'm positive they have a lot of insightful things to say. But on tariffs? Probably not so much.
With a decent sum of starting capital, an investor can become fabulously wealthy with just a few shrewd bets during an industry boom and then just ride it out by tracking the ~8% average YoY returns of the American economy. There's not nearly as much dynamism among the top wealthiest as you'd expect to see relative to something highly competitive like sports where athletes start from zero every match and must continually prove themselves.
I still think the trade was dumb. Even if Dallas had lots of inside info that Luka's diet and training regimen was terrible and had a lot of reason to believe that Luka was going to decline way sooner than anyone thinks. The haul they got back was paltry compared to what they should have gotten. It was still a 7 cents on the dollar trade as far as maximizing value.
Having said that, if Luka is like a shell of himself in 2 years I think Nico Harrison would be well within his rights to do at least a semi victory lap.
CEOs are usually investors, but most investors aren't CEOs.
Most very wealthy people aren't CEOs.
Almost every CEO running a sizeable business in US is going to be well above average in intelligence, aka smart. Are there the occasional exceptions - sure, but they're much rarer than they used to be when nepotism was much more prevalent. Now wealthy children hire smart CEOs to run their business for them. Does a CEO being smart or even quite good at that job mean they are correct about other things in life? No. But relevant to your sports example, this feels like someone saying a tennis player isn't an excellent athlete because they can't compete with linemen on NFL Pro Day.
Although given how much Oprah has done to elevate some of the worst grifters out there (Dr. Phil, Robert Kiyosaki, Dr. Oz etc.) and given how often she was hawking some pretty shady weight loss regiments and maybe worst of all, given her central role in elevating anti-vax quackery, maybe my "mistake" was more subconsciously intentional than I want to admit*.
* No I don't for one minute think Oprah is anywhere close to as bad as OAN. But given her enormous cultural impact last 30-40 years, I don't think it's wrong to call her out for elevating some pretty seriously dubious characters and ideas over the years.
The things they like are cutting taxes and suppressing the hippies. I don't think they're necessarily pro-dictatorship, but some of them are anti-anti-dictatorship.
I mean, from their perspective, for as much tariffs hurt business, they can adapt. And for all the other bad things Trump wants to, they believe that if things get bad enough they can just buy some memecoin and Trump will probably back off. Whereas AOC, Bernie Sanders, Lina Kahn, etc. want to destroy their businesses, take all their money, and throw them in prison.
In America's political culture, you could be a "good team player" and still criticize the policies of your team, as well as oppose certain nominations.
In Trump's GOP, you can't: You're either with Trump, or against him.
As I understand, the point of Matt's post is: Whybhave businessmen adopted the same submissive political positions as the GOP?
My impression, at least from the world of finance, is that it's just running on autopilot. They seem to have OVERlearned the lesson that the line always goes up in the long run, so they're acting like it's business as usual. I've heard people who should know better repeating the line "it's a negotiating tactic" about tariffs. I don't know if this is sincerely believed or if this is something we say to prevent clients from panicking.
A prediction: if, for whatever reason, the Republicans decide to pull legislation for the tax cut and let rates rise, you'll see businessmen collecting pitchforks and torches and marching on the White House chanting, "If no tax cuts, then no fascism either!"
CEOs and investors are risk takers with unwavering faith in their own agency. Trump's creating an environment that's broadly bad for business but also grants world-altering power to whichever lucky businessman gains his ear. Matt is seriously underrating the possibility that some CEOs are willing to gamble world stability because of "nah, I'd win" type thinking.
I've wondered if its a a different angle of this. Many of these businesses are selling to Trump supporters and they may be concerned that if they but not their competitors speak out against a Trump policy, that Trump will go after them and they will negatively impact their brand with his base.
Especially when you look at how much big business came out against the ACA and were warning of the apocalypse if it passed. Now we have a crank strangling the future of medical research in this country and they barely lift a finger.
Maybe the Democrats should use Khanist (Khaaaaaan!!!!!) anti-monopolism as a cudgel against their “enemies” next time rather than actually practicing it willy-nilly as they did.
Yes - it's not ideal, but this one-sided hardball can't just go on forever. The ideal situation is no one uses the government to punish their political enemies, but if Republicans won't stop, then Democrats have no choice but to shift us to the second-best outcome where both sides do it instead of just one.
They probably assumed, as did I, that they would be able to quietly lobby and push for a mostly sane set of policies. They underestimated, as did I, the extent to which RFK and similarly incompetent Trump appointees are immune to traditional lobbying. Their only patron is Trump, the only opinion they care for is Trump's, and they simply don't care whether they lobbyists are either right or are powerful.
They didn’t “let” him through. They tried. The worrisome fact is that they simply didn’t have the juice to stop a kook like RFKjr. There are no adults to turn to.
Back on April 1, Jeff Maurer had a good piece about ""Where’s This Shadowy Cabal of Business Elites I Keep Hearing About?...I am unabashedly Team Evil Cabal right now. They are exactly the bloodthirsty profit-mongers we need to step in and restore sanity. I’m told that they only care about the profit and are positively ruthless in pursuit of their interests. And I think that sounds lovely — let’s do that, how do I vote for these people? Do they even need my vote — haven’t they been pulling the levers of our Shamocracy this whole time? But if that’s true, then why don’t they pull the 'don’t tank the economy for no reason' lever? I hate to be a back-seat rapacious profiteer, but that’s what I’d do if I was stealthily manipulating the global economy from a secret lair beneath the Denver airport."
I think this is a pretty silly framing. Did companies "let" Lina Khan through? Khan / the anti-monopolist wing threated actual corp. death and they weren't able to stop her appointment. There's obviously limits to corp. power and that's a good thing.
Why would I want my business to get into a giant morass of litigation that may start to be resolved by the end ofTrump’s term? The Democrats failed to get Trump in 4 years, why do we think random corporations are going to fare better and should take the pain? Seems that not being in court at all is far better for your business than prevailing in court is against an antagonistic government that can make your life miserable, particularly if you need them for contracts.
Yes, sometimes it's smart to give into extortion from a very powerful force. But you have to have some trust that Trump will stick to the extortion deal. What do you do if he just comes back for more? He goes after weakness like a shark smelling blood in the water.
I think the correct metaphor is giving the bully your lunch money. If you give it to him, you have set a precedent, not only that he is going to come back for more, but also that the OTHER bullies notice, and they come after your money too.
If this largely succeeds, how long will it be before a Democrat president abuses power this way? What about the next non-Trump Republican?
Another relevant thing is that if you think winning a court case won’t protect you (i.e. the rule of law is going to completely collapse), then frankly your business is pretty much fucked anyway, you’re better off just acquiring guns, gasoline, and canned goods.
If you pay Trump, why do you assume that “Wait for Trump to move on” actually works?
What if he wants you to pay again tomorrow? What if JD Vance is the next president? What if the next Democrat president decides that what is good for the gander is good for the goose?
Hoping that the gangsters won’t keep saying “Fuck you, pay me” doesn’t sound like a good strategy. It’s fine if you literally have no choice, but it’s terrible if you have good alternatives.
a) it's a repeated game. This changes the game theory substancially.
b) your opponent here is powerful enough to fight on multiple fronts. Your competitor's fight won't prevent your opponent from continuing to fight you. How many payments will you make until you competitor wins the fight? How likely is it that your competitor's victory helps you (perhaps your competitor only wins a narrow victory that doesn't apply to your situation or benefit you).
No, you take advantage of your competitor fighting to make progress against them while they are distracted by the government. So you will be in a better position once your competitor emerges from the entanglement with a decision that benefits you.
The FT just published an article today, “‘Feed the gorilla’: How corporate America fought Trump’s tariffs threat”, that reports executives have been lobbying Trump heavily, but mainly in private.
That adds some color to the current situation. It begs the question, why are execs afraid of challenging him publicly? Perhaps they’ve found it’s more effective to get results by working back channels instead.
Sucks to be a small business owner who can’t get Trump’s ear.
(The article is paywalled so I can’t share the link directly, unfortunately.)
1. Trump is incredibly image conscious and thin-skinned AF. When he reads that someone 'said something nasty' about him, he absolutely flips the fuck out and wants to punish that person directly. It's revenge, all the way down.
2. Trump has a bunch of people around him who now do what he ask, even if it is stupid, illegal, or both. So if he says "I want to punish X for saying nasty things about Y" there's real risk.
3. Since the made problem for business is tariffs and the tariffs are set by the executive branch more or less making them up out of thin air, the punishment is obvious.
"My company depended on imported string from Malaysia, and I wrote a high profile op-ed that the tariffs of 45% was killing my business. When I went to the white house to ask for a carve-out, I couldn't even get an audience because of what I had said. Later the tariff went up to 80% and my competitor got a carve-out."
If you really follow the implications of this argument to the logical conclusion, you'll realize why it's so important for societies to have competing centers of power that *aren't* tightly focused on near-term profits. It's also one of the reasons Trump is directing so much firepower towards Universities, because the ideological GOP also realizes this.
Something that gets me about this is do we really want workers in America specializing in light manufacturing? I disagree with tariffs, but I understand why someone would want to have more car manufacturing in Michigan for more of those types of jobs. Someone who thinks the US should spend resources building the capacity to make card stock or plastic miniatures doesn't understand comparative advantage and tradeoffs. Those industries are practically the definition of being a middle income country. You can climb out of rural poverty by specializing in making pencils, but you can't maintain the world's richest economy on pencil factories.
Good points, and I'm sure this was all hashed out in the inter-agency debates taking place in the Trump administration, based on years of white papers issued by conservative think tanks that have been considering the best form of tariff policy. And, finally of course, the National Economic Council integrated all the varying views and presented a cogent list of options for President Trump who took time to mull it over, while tirelessly seeking out wise counsel from outside voices before making his final decision.
You just have to trust that these people have heard all the arguments and made the best decision possible and that none of these decisions were done spontaneously or by whim.
The way I look at it is post-NAFTA we lost ~ 3m light manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Mexico says it was 5m but I think this trend line (below) is a better view from our labor market's perspective. We currently have ~ 2m full time Uber / Door Dash / etc. drivers. Would pulling a % of these positions back to the US be on net good? I think so. To me the entry level position within light manufacturing offers more career growth potential than an Uber type 1099 position.
I've seen you talk about this before, but you only discuss it from the US side. What impact do you think pulling out some significant % of 3m light manufacturing jobs from Mexico to the US would have on Mexico?
To use an example, if we took half those jobs back, then add 1.5 million jobs for the 134 million full time workers in the US. These are good jobs for workers in the US, but probably wouldn't be considered way above average.
In contrast, Mexico with 59 million workers would feel the impact of losing those 1.5 million jobs much worse than the US as they are likely well above average jobs in Mexico.
Now you might say you don't care about the impact on Mexico, but given they are our southern neighbor, do you think their economy getting much worse might have an impact on the US? Could it possible impact immigration to the US as those 1.5 million jobs and the other jobs they support disappear?
It's a great question and it would be a substantial negative impact / shock on Mexico. That's a trade off. I definitely care but the way I think about it is Trump specifically and the GOP generally are worse on-net for Mexico and the Democrats electoral college tops out around 225 without the rustbelt blue wall states. I'm still very much an Obama-era Democrat and it's not surprising to me that his anti-NAFTA rhetoric and Buy American policies resulted in a +3% win in Ohio while Trump won Ohio by 12%.
I'm pretty generally just anti this 1099 "contractor" scam for all these VC companies. I think if you work ~ 40 hours a week you should get the benefits as a full time employee. I think a lot of these drivers are getting taken advantage of (e.g., not realize the accrued maintenance cost they're adding to their vehicles). But I also think they aren't career paths either. So from a career path perspective, I do think light manufacturing - as an entry point - offers more paths for growth for an early stage career.
EDIT: I misread that asking for my views. For people in general, yeah ... I think Uber > textiles for the same pay. But using a different example, I think assembly positions at Honda's new Indiana plant would be > than Uber / DoorDash.
I don't even think we'd claw back much employment, but capital intensity in US manufacturing is flat or falling, and we're watching in real-time as the rest of the world deploys automation that could be deployed at home just as easily, but isn't because we let the ecosystems slip away over the last two decades.
Agree but then I don't know why you wouldn't claw back that much employment. You still need people to run the factories. Avery James posted that tier I auto OEM supplier that shifted their injection molding production from China to Mexico in like 30 days to meet the USMCA % targets to avoid the tariffs. If the light assembly of the headlights was also here they'd have just shifted the injection moldings here too.
Assuming a middle income country has aspirations of becoming a high income country, you'd want to "specialize" on the bleeding edge of the innovation curve with the fattest margins. But then you'd still want as much of the supply chain to as vertically integrated as possible.
They can be, and now are being, completely automated from end to end, even in China. It's not even particularly expensive.
This is a capital intensity problem, and the arguments in favor of free trade are leaning on labor arbitrage as if it still meaningfully matters.
It does not. Tesla uses basically the same automation stack in China and in the US, TSMC is employing the same capital plant in Taiwan and the US, Hyundai uses the same physical plant in South Korea and the USA.
It's already become the case that a significant chunk of the automation that American firms install is no longer made at home, nor in Germany or Japan, but in China.
The US needs to deploy capital into the physical world, pronto, or the world will leave us behind.
That means effective deregulation of physical endeavor, re-regulation of digital, moderate currency devaluation, and working with the developed world to settle on a unified tariff schedule to offset Chinese domestic transfers to industry.
Hey, hey, hey. Huge, randomly applied tariffs and a level of uncertainty that renders business planning totally impossible are *good* for growth, dontcha know?
When the cultural zeitgeist literally is pro-murder of rich businessmen on one side and a bit of protection money on the other it’s not that hard for me to believe why rich businessmen feel better with Trump.
I know actual elected democrats aren’t Luigi people but I mean we chased people to restaurants and to their homes and post memes about murdering them.
By "we chased people" here you mean activists and not elected Democrats, and by "posted memes about murdering" you again mean random posters on Twitter and not prominent Democrats, right?
Democratic politicians are more of the stochastic resistance kind of folks. Ominously proclaim that, for instance, a recalcitrant court will “reap the whirlwind,” and then, hey presto, a guy with a gun just appears!
That’s unfair! I am totally bi-partisan. Or non-partisan. Or anti-partisan.* Take your pick.
Still, I think the “posts on social media” you cited are qualitatively different from a guy with a Glock and homicidal intent showing up on your front lawn. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.
.
*I don’t know, given the current political climate in the US, how anyone manages to support either of the two mentally ill parties. Sure, you may believe that one is worse than the other, but, really, to be a partisan? No thanks.
I think it’s weird that a) you think assholery is something that rich people have a monopoly on and b) you seem to think the people that say “Actually, murdering that CEO was good” are not assholes.
I don't think (a), and I'm not saying (b). What I'm saying is that if it's acceptable for businessmen to kowtow to Trump because they're afraid of retribution for crossing him, perhaps they could also ease up on screwing over sick people and expressing delight about how AI will replace the need for human workers with their demands for things like reasonable working conditions and pay. The business world apparently is OK with being intimidated into compliance with the right's preferred outcomes (fealty to Trump), so why not the same for left outcomes that are more humane and less autocratic?
Why can't outcomes like "let workers know their shifts more than a couple days in advance" or "don't throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of people using their health insurance" be achieved? I'm not talking fully automated luxury communism here, I'm talking about backing off the ruthless optimization of workers' lives, and allowing people to use the services they've paid for.
My point about C-suite assholery is not a fully formed one, but the gist is that it would be healthier for all of us if they weren't just afraid of Trump's retribution for crossing him, but also of retribution by some kind of representatives of screwed-over customers and workers, ideally in the form of an organized political party and related policy goals.
It's obviously not good to have unstable people on the fringe gun down people in the streets, though it's harder to get viscerally upset about it when you've got a head of government talking about how nice it would be to send American citizens to foreign jails, and who isn't afraid to bully companies and institutions with state power to get his way. A really really bad development over the last year is that the idea we can go back to some kind of normal where all political violence is beyond the pale, but it is definitely not solely the left who's responsible for this darker and more dangerous world.
“Why can't outcomes like ‘let workers know their shifts more than a couple days in advance’ or ‘don't throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of people using their health insurance be achieved?”
For the former, I can’t know the answer in each specific case, but, more importantly, neither can you. For the latter, I assume your assumption is wildly false.
I think it’s exactly this kind of sentiment that is the problem. You’ve reduced the entire behavior of a whole class into one sentence. There literally isn’t any way for the “rich people” to change their behavior in a way that will appease the left other than “stop being rich”, because there are always a bunch of leftists that will hate them for *something* that they did to get rich.
What are you talking about? Right wing social media commenters are constantly threatening to murder people. This has been a constant at least since Gamergate.
When the Germans were expelled from France, women who had slept with German officers had their hair cut off. This sort of calibrated, non-lethal shaming is delicious.
What shall we do to the collaborators in four years? Nothing and death are equally silly answers. Their status must be lowered and yet life should go on.
This only works if he leaves with George W Bush-level approval ratings. Otherwise this trend will just go back and forth. Democrat gets elected, has moderately unsuccessful presidency, leaves office with approval rating in the 40s, Republicans go gangbusters trying to destroy the reputations of Democrats. Back and forth and back and forth...
Until a Democrat incites a mob to storm the Capitol, there is no Democratic equivalent of Trump.
I do not expect underemployed former factory workers to be a force for stability. A healthy society can manage a discontented group of blue collar workers whose situation is hardly desperate. However, when the captains of industry go along with the demagogue, things get scary. The founders are some of the richest men in the history of our species. The executives are some of the best paid executives in the history of our species. I expect this group to sacrifice short term profits for the medium term viability of the American project. If people who have tens or hundreds of millions aren’t a force for stability, confiscation begins to look attractive.
You don't have to convince me that Trump is a unique threat, I'm just saying that if the next president also leaves office with a 44% approval rating, the next mini-Trump to get in there will do the same thing to the supporters of the previous administration. Trump has to leave office with approval in like the 20s or so for this sort of thing to stick.
I once read (in a history of Israel) that 60 plus percent of Germans still supported the final solution in 1946. Illiberal opinions are a tough nut to crack.
Right, and there was a foreign campaign of denazification to beat that out of them. Nobody is going to conduct a campaign of deMAGAfication here, so it's up to other Americans to make the case against. At least until MAGA is so unpopular that anybody associated with it is politically toxic.
honestly, prescott bush wasn’t a true new england wasp because he made his money in the middle west and then moved to connecticut. precisely because he was an arriviste, he followed the strictures more rigidly than his progeny.
cutting the hair off of collaborators is hardly misogynist. america imprisons ten men for every woman. is prison misandrist? is your notion of punishment misandrist? why do you default to the idea that punishing women is misogynist?
Because cutting off women's hair has a certain cultural resonance. "If a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, because her hair is given to her as a covering." And punishing women for their sexual activity is an evergreen, eternally popular misogynist activity.
They're not acting like he's already a dictator. They're acting like he's a thoroughly ruthless, corrupt, petty and law-breaking soft autocrat. Because that's exactly what he is. Shari Redstone isn't imagining things: Trump absolutely could and would order Bondi to interfere with Paramount's merger plans.
Business leaders are acting cowardly, sure. But they're not acting irrationally. Cowardice is often perfectly rational.
I'm not super concerned Trump will successfully launch a coup in 2028 and remain in power, but I am worried this dictatorial behavior isn't an abberation and that we're just going to go back and forth with presidents of both parties ignoring Congress and siccing the bureaucracy on their enemies. Basic liberalism needs a revival.
The GOP needs to be cleaned out from the inside and rebuilt back into a party that believes in the rule of law. If that happens, then it will be more than enough to prevent any problems on the Democratic side. If that doesn't happen, we're all screwed.
I assure you that the “hyper” thing you are noticing the resurgence of is not masculinity.
The “alpha male” is a thing that doesn’t really exist, but when people say things like “real alpha males do not have to tell you they are an alpha male”, they aren’t wrong in principle.
Separately, but somewhat related, I remain amazed by my many Trump supporting friends and acquaintances who acted like we were in the great depression when the stock market dropped for 2 days in August of 2024, wouldn't shut up when gas prices went above $4 for 2 months in 2022 and cry about "Pelosi's insider trading" suddenly having nothing to say about the stock market being down nearly 15% since Trump's inauguration, Trump's tariff charades and overall chaotic economic policy that will clearly have downsides. What has to happen for these people to admit they made a terrible mistake? An actual economic calamity that's much worse than The Great Recession. I mean, I know I shouldn't be amazed but it is truly infuriating for someone like me who lives in a Red Bubble in Florida.
This piece combines a question and a command, i.e. both “why are businesses cowering?” and “knock it off!”
Surely the same two apply equally well to Republican politicians, and the question in their case is even more baffling. Why are they cowering? What threats, exactly, have kept them in line? What is Murkowski hinting at? There has been a persistent murmur, since Trumps first regime and especially in the aftermath of Jan 6, that Republican politicians are literally in fear for their lives if they cross Trump. Not merely in fear for their political futures, but for their lives and the lives of their families.
How are these threats delivered? Why are they credible? Whom do the threateners point to as an example of the dire consequences? Has any wayward Republican really fallen out of a window? I’m not aware of it.
There is a strange undercurrent of deep terror that does not seem matched by actual events. But unfortunately, terror is effective, even when ungrounded, unless people wake up and knock it off.
Yes, your point about the fear is what really gets me to the point of spitting rage. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds by this point, of people who have testified against Trump in various court proceedings (about as adversarial a situation as you can get) who are all still walking around free and in perfect health, so why do people keep acting like it's obvious and routine that Trump *literally* has his enemies killed?!? Grow an 'effing spine people!
The only Republicans with balls are women. Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah Griffin etc. Adam Kinziger is the one outlier. Not even Ben Sasse has guts out of office.
"Not even" Ben Sasse.
That's funny.
Dem politicians are in constant fear of their staffers. GOP politicians are in constant fear of their voters.
"...fear of their staffers. GOP politicians are in constant fear...."
No, I don't think this gets at it. Politicians are always afraid that their voters will vote them out of office. But there's some new weird dynamic here, whereby Republicans are in literal fear for their lives. They only hint at the seriousness, and don't divulge details. But it's clear that they are getting repeated, credible threats that genuinely terrify them away from opposing Trump.
Dem politicians are afraid that their staffers will say that they are old and uncool, not that they will kill them. Any attempt at equivalence obscures more than it reveals.
Politicians who are afraid of their lives when no politicians have been maimed, much less killed, are cowards. We need better.
Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise would like a word.
I take your point though. If you can't do the job, then resign.
"...Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise would like a word....."
J. Wong on this thread reminds us that Paul Pelosi was also a victim of MAGA violence.
I also don't get why we discount what happened on J6 when evaluating whether legislature's concerns/fears are reasonable. They were literally all herded into secure rooms by an armed police force while an angry mob stormed their offices with such murderous intent that the Secret Service literally shot one of them. It feels a bit like saying "I don't get why you're worried about being shot. You were shot at last year but your bullet proof vest stopped the bullet. Sure, the shooter still has his guns and all his bullets, but he's not actively pointing a gun at you right this second." Being uninjured when someone tries to injure you doesn't make your concerns about being attacked unreasonable.
I'm sorry, but if any one of us had that happen in our offices then I don't think anyone would be lecturing us on whether our safety concerns were reasonable when the group that did the attack had literally only gained in power since the original attack. We would all be agreeing that the fears are at least understandable.
Scalise was shot by a leftwing attacker. Giffords was shot at 14(!) years ago by a gunman who had nothing to do with Trump.
They’re not afraid of Trump killing them. They are afraid of crazy people feeling empowered by the political moment to kill. There’s a reason Trump was shot at too, and it’s more closely related to RFK and Twitter than to Trump himself.
Haven't they always received them? I am not sure to what degree anti-abortion and pro-gun violence was actually a real problem but there was at least a perception it was and lots if death threats issued.
Powerful people get threatened all the time (and for centuries - this ain't new) - politicians or not. That's not an excuse for not doing your job. Maybe don't be a politician if you can't handle that.
>But there's some new weird dynamic here, whereby Republicans are in literal fear for their lives. They only hint at the seriousness, and don't divulge details. But it's clear that they are getting repeated, credible threats that genuinely terrify them away from opposing Trump.
I've read a few articles asserting this is the case, but they're always anonymously-sourced and full of ambiguous quotes that don't necessarily support the editorialized headlines. Can you link whatever you think is the most compelling article demonstrating the reality of the trend you describe?
My gut reaction has been, and remains, to discount these articles as wishful thinking motivated by a desire to find some other explanation for Trump's iron grip on the GOP beyond his popularity with GOP voters and his proven ability to destroy the careers of Republican politicians.
Mitt Romney seems to come the closest to going on the record:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/romney-gop-members-feared-far-right-violence-ahead-key-votes-rcna105272
Fair, but Romney was talking about two very specific votes in the immediate aftermath of a violent attack on the Capitol wherein the anonymous politicians Romney talked to were themselves at risk.
Ordinarily, you would expect the fear of physical harm to fade with time and an absence of additional incidents. My inclination is to believe that it *has* very much faded and that fear of physical harm plays only a very small role, if any, in the present abject subservience of GOP politicians.
I think this is exactly what Alan is getting at? Physical fear from their voters.
"...this is exactly what Alan is getting at...."
Perhaps you are right that Allan meant that GOP pols are afraid that their voters will kill them. But then there is still no equivalency with Dem staffers, who are at worst going to frown sanctimoniously and wag their fingers at you.
no I meant that not giving absolute deference to Dear Leader will cause GOP pols to get voted out immediately. Not a physical fear (though I suppose that could be the case)
I don't think these two things are remotely equivalent.
Then don't run for office. Simple. Powerful people, in politics and not, have been threatened by less-powerful people for centuries. This isn't new.
That’s not a good solution. We already have a lot of bad selection effects on who runs for office. Asking people not to run if they have normal reactions to death threats means it’s only an even weirder set who bother.
Okay? Not sure why you’re getting worked up responding to me
Which Dem politicians from the last cohort have most recently demonstrated their commitment to this narrative? All I got is Bidens and Pelosis. I recall Schumer making an important judgement call, but as far as I know, he's still in office.
I'm personally thinking Lina Khan and Gary Gensler will have to lead the corporate renegotiation, likely working w/ David Sachs. I could see those three coming up w/ a new "Contract w/ The Global Investing Community in American Assets". We'll need Lael Brainard and Summers to sanctify this from an academic perspective. JPow and the rest of the rest Fed can just largely ignore this for at least a year or two, regardless of what Trump says, as long as it's reasonably aligned w/ this new contract. May take a decade or two for that to be ancient history. Like just another chapter in the Global Financial Crisis and another Tooze book.
A 50 year old man is more equipped to slap an obnoxious zoomer than a 70 year old man.
Not that I am advocating this, but the ability to physically intimidate helps prevent coups.
What Dem politicians are scared of their staffers and how is this relevant?
I think the original error of opposition to Trump from every corner, not just the partisan side you'd expect, has been a crazed apocalypticism when the reality is that he's a farcical ass. People like that do real damage with real consequences and that has happened and will continue to happen. However at some point it's more effective to treat him as an unfit buffoon rather than constantly telling everyone they should be shaking in their boots.
100%. The resistance needs more "the emperor has no clothes" and less "the emperor is going to invade Poland".
More than anything they need to read more about Latin America and less about Germany and Russia. There are many Trump like figures in Latin America who were corrupt and centralised power without being anything like Putin.
That's a good comment and I think there's a weird reticence about understanding America as a New World country that in some ways has more in common with Latin America than Europe, even though we have historically been (and will probably mostly continue to be) a European diaspora nation.
Peron!
I have been thinking for a while now about the Trump-Peron similarity.
Yes, I happened to be reading recently about Peron for other reasons, and I kept thinking, "Huh."
I read someone make a Porfirio Diaz reference once and that seemed relatively good.
But the truth is in between - Trump isn't Hitler, but he's not just a buffoon with empty bluster this time around. The real threat is something like Franco, Mussolini, or a Latin American dictatorship, which is still very bad and legitimately frightenting.
Both things can be true at the same time - in fact, I suspect there are few cases of the later existing until itself.
I wasn't saying which one was true or not. I was saying which one would be a more effective political strategy.
Ah, I see. I could definitely be persuaded that this would've been the right approach to take during the election itself when Trump was on the ballot, be deflating enthusiasm among his supporters and keeping swing voters within reach. I'm not sure whether or not it mobilizes opposition, especially going into the midterms.
Well said. Calling people fascists, nazis, etc. just doesn't change any type of behavior and rolls off the intended targets backs at this point. Extreme language somehow has minimal effect since it's everywhere, especially if you're particularly online. Clutching pearls and scolding simply doesn't work. Harvard's way of publicly digging in is much more effective as Matt points out.
I can't speak for the threats angle, but just on political incentives- very few Republicans are going to stay in office if they defy Trump. There was some statistic going around the other week about how a huge majority of the House now was elected after 2016, so they really have no memory of a pre-Trump Republican party. And just practically- there's very very little angle to stay in office as a Trump-defying Republican. It's not just primaries- almost no districts have enough voters that will say 'hey I disagree with Trump but I still want to vote Republican'. If the voters in your district disagree with Trump enough, they're just going to vote for a Democrat. There are no incentives to vote independently
Yep, this is why the Republican party is going to be a complete shit show when Trump departs the scene. Nobody can weild the cult following he does.
Alternative theory: they're actually fine with what Trump is doing but saying so outright might garner looks of pity and scorn from people they want some smidgen of approval from.
Thus they need a plausible explanation for their acquiescence.
This feels more likely. Need enough cover so you can still get the cocktail party invitations.
My understanding is the threats come from crazed Trump supporters, and are for disturbing acts of violence. You say no Republican has fallen out a window, but a congressman was shot at a softball game, a presidential candidate was shot giving a speech, and the Capitol was invaded by a mob calling for the lynching of various political figures. And yes, only the last of those came from Trump followers, but the vibe is “there are a lot of crazies, they’re screaming at us, keep your head down.”
You’re looking for Putin-style actions, but it’s random political violence that’s the fear.
Trump himself was shot!
"Hang Mike Pence" might have something to do with it.
"..."Hang Mike Pence" might have something...."
Good, that's what I'm looking for.
Except: that was a one-off threat by a fairly disorganized mob. It would be easy for anyone to discount it -- especially when you are part of a party devoted to pretending nothing happened on Jan. 6. What is the sustained level of detailed threats in the years following that which have made it seem credible?
Also, of course, Mike Pence continues to be alive and has remained publicly critical of Trump . . . .
"...Mike Pence continues to be alive ...."
Why isn't Ted Koppel giving us nightly updates on this situation?
Trump got shot. Scalise got shot. Giffords got shot. There was a plot to kidnap Whitmer. Reagan was almost killed. The entire Kennedy family - except Ted & RJK, Jr... - appears to be snakebit.
Politicians are threatened all the time. Do you job despite that or quit politics. It's fine.
This sounds like a problem to fix, not something we should wield as yet another selection effect on who should go into politics.
Demanding you put up with sociopathy to be in politics makes it hard to get any decent people in politics.
I think it ultimately just comes down to the reality that for all their machismo and bluster about guns, etc., conservative politicians and businessmen are cowards and tools. They only mock and despise Biden because they know that he would never harm them - and because they are encouraged by their in-group to do so. But take away that safety...
Paging Senator Hawley: https://youtu.be/ByWvdGJ8CwM?t=46
That one is always good for a laugh.
I think the threats aren't organized, but they are definitely there coming from the MAGA politic. Romney hires his own security for his family and him. Murkowski gives voice to what is happening. No one knows how credible the threats are just that they are happening.
No one wants to be the first Paul Pelosi on the Republican side.
Why would anyone go after Romney? He retired and reliquished any sway he had, which is typical for the anti-Trump Republicans.
I imagine a lot of people in positions of power are noticing that the "why" questions aren't giving them very good insights these days.
We know of at least one case-- the DOGE whistleblower had a threat and candid photographs of him out walking his dog taped to his office door after he reported.
Would not be surprising if others have had threats that successfully silenced them.
I think it's overwhelming fear of primary challenges, and fear of losing post-office professional opportunities (I'd imagine lobbying gigs and wingnut welfare are harder to get if you've been blackballed by half the political establishment). There's also the possibility of lawfare and IRS audits.
But sure, the fact that keeping your head down might keep you and your family safer from freelance right wing terrorism is an added value. There's only a hint of violence at this point, but a hint can still be powerful, and Trump himself has frequently used rhetoric that appears to encourage his more extreme supporters to engage in violence against his political enemies.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/donald-trump-violence-threats-fbi-migrants-judges/
A brief perusal of Twitter. sorry X, comments on politician's feeds will give you a hint of where these threats are coming from.
“Whom do the threateners point to as an example of the dire consequences?” Senator Flake, Ambassador Haley, VP Pence, Governor Christy…
My general sense is that it's less "believing he's a dictator" and more "being paralyzed by uncertainty."
This is such a *weird* administration, with half of the figures total cranks. Everything moves fast and changes all the time. It's hard to figure out what the President is committed to and what's trolling or a weird passing whim. His approval ratings change quickly.
Businesses which fancy themselves strategic are having a hard time figuring out what the strategic choice is right now.
I have a buddy who works at peloton and they have a whole team dedicated to decoding Trump's tariff policies. Seems like they should just get an astrologist.
"...a buddy who works at peloton...."
Well, Trump's tariff policy so far has involved a lot of backpedaling....
I think this is where Howard Lutnick comes in. Seemingly every few days he makes some pronouncement that progress on tariffs is happening, market booms that day on the news…and nothing happens.
I asked the other day why Matt thinks the market skyrocketed last week and the fact the market booms every time Lutnick hints that tariffs might be slightly lessened is a big data point to me that Wall Street/Big Business (or enough people in positions of power) have made a bet tariffs will be fully lifted and to “believe” Lutnick. Now my suspicion is every time Lutnick says something like this and nothing happens should eventually make this a “boy who cried wolf” situation. But for now it seems best explanation is a whole lot of people who think “hey once Americans see empty shelves and complain enough, he’ll definitely back off then”. And…they might be right.
Why are the markets moving? There is a huge amount of hot money floating around looking for outsized gains. They have been basically making money since the recovery after 2008. So the market is super saturated with vibe investing by people who can't read a balance sheet or decipher corporate strategy. And to call them investors is really a stretch. I am sure many of these people didn't understand tariffs when they were voting but they do understand there is still money to be made in the short run as the overall market gyrates to each statement.
The other thing I noted in my question to Matt as to why market went up more than it seemingly should have recently is I speculated the number of retail investors has only ballooned in the past 5-10 years to the point that they can move markets in a way not possible even 2008.
But I think to follow up my point is I think we underestimate how many "elite" investors have drunk the conservative "kool-aid" as well. This predates Trump. My lodestar for this take is John Paulson the hedge fund manager. He's one of the Wall Street titans who became famous for shorting the market in 2007...and make an absolute fortune as a result. So for awhile he became a bit of a go to "guru". When in fact it seems like he started imbibing lots of right wing media and started mouthing off that inflation and hyper inflation was around the corner. Except the real key here is that he put his money where is mouth was. He clearly believed this to be true despite very little actual evidence this was going to happen. And result was pretty major losses at a time when he should have been posting major gains. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstv4vjyrgcjjhjdi1a8/corner-office/in-speaking-out-john-paulson-decides-the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense
Was a real "canary in the coal mine" for me regarding right of center elites; that and Scalia's dissent in Lawrence vs Texas (the language he used in that dissent was the language of someone clearly listening to too much right wing talk radio).
It is very much vibe investing. A large amount of the investment flow is not using a objective measures. Just look at Tesla, it is up $100 from a year ago. Is there a rational case that they are $100 more valuable than a year ago? Or at one point $200 higher than today. As someone who sees occasional clips of CNBC and Fox Business, there is a weird ignoring of the ultra high valuation in the market and that the vast majority of the risk is downside. I think it would have broken by now except the limited of options for a safe US haven for people's funds.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes.
Reminder maybe that all this stuff is not as new as we think it is.
It's both, not either/or.
The uncertainty is absolutely paralyzing.
But many companies are also applying "tall poppy syndrome:" the poppy that stands taller is the one that gets chopped down. Even when they believe fighting is wise, they (not irrationally) conclude that the first to fight will, at best, achieve a pyrrhic victory.
Yeah, and they feed on each other. Like, if Trump declares he's going to do something stupid, as he does multiple times a week, and you're trying the calculus of, "Do I potentially earn his ire by standing up and saying that this is stupid," you then have this additional calculus of, "And is this even in any way real? Like, if I don't do anything will it just vanish in two days?"
Yeah, the administration keeps running blitzes and nobody has figured out yet what the political equivalent of a screen pass is.
When have you ever known a businessman to be too paralyzed by uncertainty to speak their mind? You're talking about businessmen as if they're scientists. The latter prefers precision, the former prefers clout.
Despite the worries and concerns business leaders have about Trump's actions -- and they have real concerns as Matt rightly notes -- I don't think you can overestimate how worried they were about the 2018-2024 Democratic Party. SEC proposals around Climate Change; the codifying of DEI, hostility to businesses at the FTC and the migration of culture war battlegrounds from the campuses into the workplace were all real fears. (The Common Sense Democrat Manifesto will go a long way to alleviating those fears in 2028.) Importantly, changes during those years were in areas where business leaders were unsure of what to do. And they hate, hate, hate not knowing what to do!
Most of the threats from Trump are about increasing input costs. Business leaders know how to adapt, change and compete in that area. So, though they don't like what Trump is doing, they believe they know how to act. Read through a few Q1 earnings transcripts and you will see that almost all companies are saying something similar: "We will use a combination of pricing actions, cost reductions and sourcing strategies to maintain competitiveness". They have a playbook so they spend their time running their plays rather than complaining about the changing rules.
Destroying trade and supply chains is much worse for businesses than “codifying DEI” or whatever. This is not serious. Rather the business community is hopeful for something changing. But it’s not just input costs, it’s exports, it’s business certainty, it’s consumer sentiment and supply and demand.
An adverse investment environment and business climate affect your company - DEI affects you, the businessman, personally.
Which is worse for your career and personal income.
Also what legally codified DEI things happened to executives? Please explain? And does this include their own DEI initiatives?
I didn't say this was *smart* of businessmen - if you want to do gross shit and get canceled because people are more attuned to bad behavior due to wokeness/DEI being salient, that does have consequences for your career and personal income. Obviously the correct solution is don't be a womanizer or a racist asshole, but if you *are* one, then it makes sense to be more concerned about people having the nerve to call you on it than about your golden parachute being downgraded to a silver one on account of "broader macro conditions".
The part of “DEI” that’s existentially concerning here is that your workforce, hiring, promotions, etc. are expected to be representative of overall US demographics without regard to how credentials, aptitude, skills, and experience in the relevant fields are distributed.
https://www.ft.com/content/973421a3-c96a-4038-96c6-725af5aa6124
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
i.e, no, in a lot of cases, it's not liberation from actual quotas or actual requirements about running your business, it's liberation from people calling you on your shit.
"your workforce, hiring, promotions, etc. are expected to be representative of overall US demographics"
Also, what's the "or else" here? Because I think the "or else" is "people will be mad at me online or they'll try to stage a boycott that doesn't go anywhere".
A lot of DEI and woke stuff is annoying, but if you want to go around thinking of yourself as a business titan maybe you should buck up, make decisions best for your business as you see them, ride out any resulting fits thrown by the blue-haired progressive crowd, and not be a sniveling, whiny little coward who needs to feel validated in everything they do to the point where you back a wannabe Pinochet for president.
Is this like just a hypothetical or does this represent some survey of CEOs? I really don’t think for most executives “cancellation” for sex or racism was the major animating dispute for them. Instead they thought Trump 2 was going to be tax cuts and light touch regulation. Despite legions of information to the contrary they just got it really really wrong
DEI is not a reaction to womanizing or racism. It’s categorically different and much worse.
My sense is that The Common Sense Democrat Manifesto doesn't necessarily exclude Lina Khan and Gary Gensler. It just doesn't make them the center piece of your politics.
Part of me thinks they are waiting for someone to make the first move, and when Trump’s ability to punish their pushback is shown to be impotent they are going to go all Ides of March on Trump.
“Et tu Elon?”
From past comments I understand you to be in a business-facing field of finance, but... this is a several-orders-of-magnitude understatement to the problems of sourcing and business planning that your clientele are facing right now.
If they aren't panicking, it is because they have either reached the "acceptance" stage of mourning, or they expect last-second deals before substantial pain is felt.
If they thought that the Democratic policy plan for business circa 2020 primaries was worse for them than whatever *this* is, I really don't know what to say.
I think there is an interesting cultural and historical question embedded here. In the 1920s, business and business people (and rich people generally) were lionized, only to fall hard from grace post-1929. And, broadly, from 1932 until Reagan, business was treated as just another interest group - a disliked interest group under pre-WWII FDR ("I welcome their hatred"), an actively cultivated interest group under Eisenhower, a warily approached but not necessarily hostilely regarded interest group under JFK and LBJ; a surprisingly remote and not terribly beloved interest group under Nixon - but in all instances, a legitimate interest group, but one held at greater or lesser degrees of arms' length. No CEO would have particularly expected to have his self-worth, social contribution or sense of purpose validated by the president or, really, by much of any politician. Since the age of Reagan, by contrast, business leaders have gotten re-accustomed to being lionized, consulted, treated like bigshots, over-praised as "job creators", treated in the mainstream discourse as sort-of semi-immune from criticism. How much was the extremely negative reaction to Biden - which I agree was very definitely A Thing - something that came from a rather petulant and childlike reaction to not having one's collective behind kissed as a class? Biden was, in this telling, a reversion to the pre-Reaganite norm (an era which, of course, was formative to his career as a politician!), and frankly, it feels objectively disproportional to me for business to have decided to caricature Biden as if he were the equivalent of Salvador Allende or Chavez or some such, just because business got treated at arms' length and not otherwise as a privileged class for four years, and the government looked at antitrust and other regulatory initiatives that wouldn't have looked unusual in the 1960s or 70s.
Yes, yes, yes - policies can be bad for business, but the C-suite is insulated from those effects, because they can pass through price increases and to the extent the business struggles, it's understood to not be their fault - and if they do lose their jobs, they've got the resources to not hit rock bottom and enter the underclass like their workers might. What Democrats struggle with (because it's annoying and unwarranted) is fawning over a business class full of people who fancy themselves the next John Galt when they're actually people with a somewhat above-average ability to manage people and coordinate projects.
My deepest fear about 2028 is that despite having the shadow Elizabeth Warren administration, most voters believe they got Joe Biden, and thus a real lead pipe wielding lefty can still argue real progressivism has never been tried and now more than ever and might break thru, to similar damaging effect.
Most Democratic party voters think Biden did a good job governing, and I'm always a little confused by the punditry that Democrats are going to throw him under the bus for catering to the groups. After all, the groups simply are the formal organizing apparatus of the Democratic party's policy interests. It'd be like suggesting Heritage can be thrown under the bus overnight; who is going to pick up the rest of the staffing in a GOP admin?
Trump is president because he throws Heritage, et al, under the bus whenever he finds it convenient and the conservatives just take it without complaint when it happens.
There are plenty of Heritage people in this admin.
Didn’t they write Project 2025?
Sure, and Trump still had no problem publicly throwing them under the bus whenever convenient. These are not mutually exclusive.
The difference is Trump literally can and will not only say no, but essentially put them out of business on a whim. He controls the party and Heritage does his bidding or it’s out in the cold with no political juice whatsoever and both sides know it.
Heritage and other GOP groups et al in 2016 surely still sought maximalist positions on entitlement reform, abortion, and gay marriage. And many of the groups including the GOP itself sought a reset to more welcoming rhetoric on immigration. Donald Trump did precisely the inverse on every account to immense political success. The groups of the right don't appear to mind such heresy!
And yet Heritage has demanded major Medicaid cuts that now seem likely to be implemented. Roe v. Wade is gone thanks to Supreme Court appointments. And we still don't know what's going to happen to gay marriage.
Trump threw Heritage under the bus last summer.
Rhetorically, yes. But he wound up staffing his administration with a bunch of people from Heritage anyways.
Someone tell Russell Vought. This may have slipped past him.
In exactly the same way that Biden threw Elizabeth Warren under the bus.
"Most Democratic party voters think Biden did a good job governing," this is precisely my fear. Democratic Party voters don't see the problem, but normal voters sure do.
You can be sure that Trump will change normal voters' minds about the quality of Biden's governance.
Normal voters may begin to see things differently when Trump solves none of the problems they had under Biden while bringing on a recession and a new problem—unemployment going up, as it does in every recession.
I don't think it's accurate to call the Groups the formal organizing apparatus of the Democratic Party's policy interests. They are separate interest group orgs with their own institutional interests, notably they maintain influence with the constant threat of defection. Of course, there's also a giant issue with principal-agent problem with the groups between the organizations and people they supposedly represent.
On the point I am not sure you're correct about the view of the Biden Admin. Democratic voters are mad, mainly from losing to Trump again. I don't think there's a lot of strongly approve people in terms of Biden. But, there's not a consensus on what went wrong, which is mired in the usual factional disagreements.
If Harris runs again she's likely to get from both sides, even though she would be the front runner.
Let's start with the view of the Biden admin:
As of April 27th, YouGov found Democrats among US registered voters view Biden favorably by 81.4% to 16.8%[1]. As of their last poll asking on January 19th, YouGov found Democrats approved of Biden's job as president by 86.9% to 10.6%[2]. Democrats overwhelmingly view the former president favorably and think he did a good job as president. This is what Democrats thought in January, at the peak of Trump's honeymoon with approval among voters. As Trump (likely) maintains his mid-to-low 40s approval today or potentially falls further, I doubt Democrats will revise their approval of Biden's job downward.
Now as for the groups (or "Warren staffers", whichever term we prefer for labeling "people who staff and influence Democratic administrations",) these heavily informed Biden's decision-making on a variety of policy issues, including the economy and immigration which Gallup found as the most important issues in this election[3]. Here is an example[4] of the groups praising Susan Rice's departure in 2023 from the Biden admin because they dislike her desired policies on immigration to deter minors entering the US.
Personally, I put too much stock in 2020 in the idea Democrats would rethink their trajectory on the immigration issue in light of Trump's narrow loss due to the COVID issue. They instead went in the direction (if not always the details) of what policy people in the party wanted, which meant record immigration through the asylum court backload. I've learned my lesson of what to expect from their future administrations.
[1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/joe-biden-favorability?crossBreak=democrat
[2] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/president-biden-job-approval-rating?crossBreak=democrat
[3] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/653303/political-fundamentals-foreshadowed-trump-victory.aspx
[4] https://thehill.com/homenews/3978769-susan-rice-departure-relief-immigration-advocates/
I don't think overall approval is all that indicative in the factional fight context. The Pew numbers have consistently given Biden weak "strong approval" numbers from Democrats and Dem leaners since 2022. One third in this survey from 2024.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/07/11/joe-bidens-job-approval-views-of-the-republican-and-democratic-parties/
It's worse than that. The energy for opposing Trump and the Republicans will mostly come from the progressive side because they're the ones with the most passion, and this will give them a leg up in 2028.
Nate Silver picked AOC first in his 2028 democratic primary draft.
Yeah, pretty much.
If I were AOC, I'd go live in South Carolina for the next few years and make as many friends as I can.
On one hand, when it comes to rank and file right-of-center *voters*, I think this comment is dead on.
On the other hand, when it comes to *businesses*, I have to think that anyone involved in any decisions in a business who have seen the tariffs have, no matter how much they disliked the Biden administration, gone "holy sh-t this is a different thing."
Maybe I'm underplaying it, but Lena Kahn just isn't global trade-war levels of scary. (I think this in particular because I think the risk of stagflation due to a trade war is very real and that's going to result in a fiscal crisis. The down-sides here are generationally bad.)
With that in mind, I think there is an element of truth here. If the democrats were going in with Obama era policies and not Biden era policies, "business is afraid of the left" wouldn't even be a thing.
To the extent that a bunch of people in the comments are poo-poo-ing this idea, I think part of that is the sort of weird bate-and-switch aspect of the Biden administration. We voted for the old catholic white guy over the lefties to tack to the center to beat trump, and then got an administration to the left of the Obama, run by progressives.
Rich businessmen really hated Obama.
https://www.newsweek.com/schwarzman-its-war-between-obama-wall-st-71317
How much of this was the business community actually viewing Obama as anti-business and how much was Schwarzman just being a total rich asshole? Like...I look back at how Obama treated wall-street and think "y'all got off so easy...one fin-reg bill passed, a bail-out, and basically no one of consequence went to jail?"
Schwarzman was probably the worst but he wasn't the only one.
You and I both think that the financial people got off easy under Obama but we're incapable of comprehending the depth of self-pity of this class.
Perhaps the circle can be squared by two things: (1) a trade war hits everyone whereas antitrust is targeted and (2) it's possibly to curry favor with this administration, thereby providing another avenue to get one up on your competitors. Of course, this may just be an attempt at rationalizing the irrational.
I realized after I posted that John used "were", and I think he's not wrong that business leaders thought Biden/Kahn were worse than their predicted Trump 2.0...it's just their predictions were off base because now he does the things he thinks up.
I think the big difference in vocality is about vengence. Anti-trust is targeted, but Biden wasn't calling up Lena Kahn and saying "so and so said mean shit about me in the NYT, go kill their merger." Trump is always out for payback at all times...he publicy says out loud what he'd like to do as payback even when it's obviously so out of bounds that people go "I can't believe he said that."
Or maybe they're just passing the tenth floor after having fallen from the twentieth floor and no real harm so far so just stick with the plan.
I remember the "confidence fairy" back in the day. Presumably, businesses like some kind of stability so they can plan for the future. To see one guy toy with the entire global economic system daily on a whim has to be the greatest threat they've ever faced. Yes -- stay with me here please -- possibly even more than the codifying of DEI.
>I don't think you can overestimate how worried they were about the 2018-2024 Democratic Party.<
Yes, it is Democrats who are the real threat to the freedom of people who run businesses. Plus, everybody knows Democrats are terrible for profits.
But don’t businesses need to plan? To commit to a course of action? The biggest problem as I understand it is businesses (like everyone else) being unable know what they need to do because they never know what Trump will do tomorrow.
People were so worried about Democratic policies they had to double the S&P just to cope with the constant anxiety!
ETA I would love to read just one comments section on Substack that doesn't devolve into an elaborate theory about how "woke" was the real problem.
It's wrong when people assume that disliking Trump's policies implies accepting Biden's.
What concerns me today is when businesses forgo taking action against the administration that is the right thing to do for their business only because they are worried about retribution.
I mean, I think you're absolutely right - well-off businessmen would prefer an economic collapse due to a trade war over the worry they might have to pay higher taxes, their workers might actually have more power and leverage than they like, and people that don't treat them like the Masters of the Universe are in control.
I think one of the issues is many (prob not most) C suite ppl (including partners at those law firms) are very risk averse and short sighted to jump on to make a decision that might seem lucrative in short term - in a sense, they are like NFL HCs who can’t call 4th down gamble even if analytics call for it.
They seem to forget the structure of this game (in a game theory sense) is repetitive.
The good news though is those law firms seem to be punished by Microsoft as well as incoming law school students at prestigious law schools
"Very risk averse and short sighted" also explains "woke capital" a few years back. They don't take political positions out of principle, but they will side with what seems popular this quarter or avoids immediate, visible backlash.
100% agreed. I think those are flip side of coins
I think part of this is the sense that, heavily informed by Trump 1, Nothing Ever Happens, especially when Trump is president. For some reason the pandemic has been largely assigned to Democrats and Biden. Until people start really feeling actual pain explicitly under the rule of Donald John Trump, there's a suspension of disbelief in elite circles, especially business circles.
Trump has been far more effective in creating second order effects for perceived disloyalty to the Administration. The BigLaw settlements are the best example. The firms didn’t settle because of the cost of litigating or fear of losing. They capitulated because Trump made it clear he would target their clients, and their clients made it known to the firms that they would choose different firms rather than becoming collateral damage. Which is entirely sensible from the perspective of each individual business-the administration has the capacity to seriously hurt any business in America. AT&T destroyed Trump’s DOJ in court during the last administration, and it cost them tens of millions of dollars. And that was a far more restrained DOJ that wasn’t going all in on a slash and burn strategy of attacking Trump’s enemies in the courts, in a judiciary that wasn’t nearly as dominated by Trump appointees, etc. The lesson? It’s just better not to be a target.
Add in the fact that Trump has essentially turned the federal government into a protection racket where he alone decides who gets taxed what on tariffs, who has to follow the securities laws law or not, etc., and any business large enough to draw his attention feels the need to be in line to pay tribute.
It’s very bad. It is the most troubling thing of the first 100 days as you say. But it is very, very difficult to solve because the Republican Party has fully embraced the corruption and there are no longer any meaningful institutional levers that matter to the public.
Trump's actions in this regard work as long as people believe he can carry out his threats. So they self-deter. If, somehow, his threats prove empty, then the whole house of cards could fall.
One thing that will help is his increasing unpopularity. Over time, he'll appear weaker, and people will be more willing to buck him. But someone has to be the first to go.
Sure, but the reality is that Trump needs very little public popularity to cause serious harm to businesses he dislikes. The regulatory state he controls can take a pound of flesh almost at will, even if it proves legally wrong.
These companies are pretty good at suing.
Sure. And they might win some. And have their merger delayed by 2-3 years. Or spend $50 million in attorney fees. Or have regulatory approvals withheld elsewhere. Or they can deal with none of that and not be a target. Most businesses will choose not to be a target.
Good thing he let Elmo eviscerate the regulatory state and state capacity.
Reality is that you only need significant government capacity to do regulation well. You can get away with petty, vindictive regulatory enforcement on a shoestring budget because of the money for a well functioning system goes to finding the correct targets of enforcement.
So far universities are the first ones standing up to his threats. But that’s partly because he’s already done the worst by canceling all of science.
Can the Dems do the same thing when they retake power? Because they absolutely should.
I don’t think they should continue to turn the government into a protection racket.
That would absolutely be terrible for society.
One possibility for at least some of these businessmen is that they support Trump's overall political project and therefore are willing to take some hits personally in order to be good team players and maximize that project's likelihood of success.
I’ve said before that Matt is way too invested in the “CEOs are actually very smart people” theme. And my point isn’t to say CEOs are dumb or got to their position by failing upward which is the original intent of his point. But rather, just because CEOs are usually pretty smart and capable, doesn’t mean they aren’t susceptible to propaganda.
Again there is the famous South African example (to semi quote Rick James, Ketamine is a hell of a drug). But even beyond that CEOs by and large have been a center right voting constituency historically. Wall Street Journal editorial page (I’d venture most popular place CEOs get political opinions) has been admirably trashing tariffs last few months but for the most part last 8 years have been Trump sycophants. But I think Matt would be surprised how many of these guys (and it’s almost all guys) are probably imbibing lots Fox and even OWN
I mean we’ve seen this with law enforcement. We’ve seen cops make claims about fentanyl and crime that are odds with their actual lived experience (as an extreme example of this; see Eric Adams claiming crime was worse in 2022 than when he was a cop in the 80s). Why wouldn’t this applies to CEOs*
* time to open a can of worms. Yes there was an uptick in retail shoplifting in 2021. Far left was wrong to deny this. But honestly, how much of countermeasures are an overreaction by people who watched too much Fox News
There are a lot of CEOs who are also really smart on the very specific job of "make this type of widget/service and deliver it to customers" and have little understanding of the world outside of that, but think they have a deeply-informed worldview.
Among the thousands of "how trump won" or "how could so many people vote for Trump" think pieces, I think it remains underrated the extent a large number of voters think Trump is some super competent businessman and therefore must have the skills to be President. I mean this precedes Trump; this was a huge part of the base case for GWB and Romney to be President. The government is like a business so therefore you need some CEO type to run the business. Which is very mistaken, but I think makes a lot of intuitive sense even to a decent number of voters who voted for Clinton, Biden and Harris.
This is related to my take that Mark Burnett deserves A LOT of credit/blame for Trump's reputation. I think we underrate the extent to which people think "reality" tv is "real". That these are accurate pictures of the people on these shows despite the fact these shows are extremely deceptively edited and even scripted to give a very particular vision of the various characters (and yes they are characters). And on "The Apprentice", they made Trump look like the most decisive and successful businessman imaginable.
Heck, this stuff happens even with regular tv shows or movies. https://www.ranker.com/list/actors-hated-because-of-their-villain-characters/karen-fratti. So guess we shouldn't be that surprised that millions of people think Trump is the actual person portrayed in The Apprentice.
Trump really is a character from TV even more than from social media. It’s hard to understand how much delay there is in various forms of media impacting politics.
This is pretty much captured in the bifurcated approach of the Wall Street Journal: the news side is straight down the middle and reliable and the editorial pages provide the mindless propaganda that apparently businessmen like to read to give their brain a vacation from having to think.
"I’ve said before that Matt is way too invested in the “CEOs are actually very smart people” theme."
I've seen you mention this before, but it seems the same as saying someone is too invested in the "academics are actually very smart people" theme. Both academics and CEOS are very likely to be smart people. But smart ≠ correct on any given issue! Your second point stands on its own: plenty of smart people are blinded/influenced by their biases, preferences, assumptions, news sources, social circles, etc. whether they be CEOs or academics.
I mean I don't disagree.
It's actually one of the reasons I found it so amazing so much attention is paid to people like Gender Studies professors. Like not only from the standpoint that very few students actually take these classes that get outsized attention. But also, like why does anyone think these professors would have sharp insights into economics or political strategy or any more so then..well..CEOs? Like on the specific topics of feminism, I'm positive they have a lot of insightful things to say. But on tariffs? Probably not so much.
With a decent sum of starting capital, an investor can become fabulously wealthy with just a few shrewd bets during an industry boom and then just ride it out by tracking the ~8% average YoY returns of the American economy. There's not nearly as much dynamism among the top wealthiest as you'd expect to see relative to something highly competitive like sports where athletes start from zero every match and must continually prove themselves.
I think athletic abilities also start to decline notably even by age 30.
Or if you're Luka, by age 26.
oof too soon...lol.
I still think the trade was dumb. Even if Dallas had lots of inside info that Luka's diet and training regimen was terrible and had a lot of reason to believe that Luka was going to decline way sooner than anyone thinks. The haul they got back was paltry compared to what they should have gotten. It was still a 7 cents on the dollar trade as far as maximizing value.
Having said that, if Luka is like a shell of himself in 2 years I think Nico Harrison would be well within his rights to do at least a semi victory lap.
CEOs are usually investors, but most investors aren't CEOs.
Most very wealthy people aren't CEOs.
Almost every CEO running a sizeable business in US is going to be well above average in intelligence, aka smart. Are there the occasional exceptions - sure, but they're much rarer than they used to be when nepotism was much more prevalent. Now wealthy children hire smart CEOs to run their business for them. Does a CEO being smart or even quite good at that job mean they are correct about other things in life? No. But relevant to your sports example, this feels like someone saying a tennis player isn't an excellent athlete because they can't compete with linemen on NFL Pro Day.
I think you have confused the One America Network (OAN) with the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)
Haha yes.
Although given how much Oprah has done to elevate some of the worst grifters out there (Dr. Phil, Robert Kiyosaki, Dr. Oz etc.) and given how often she was hawking some pretty shady weight loss regiments and maybe worst of all, given her central role in elevating anti-vax quackery, maybe my "mistake" was more subconsciously intentional than I want to admit*.
* No I don't for one minute think Oprah is anywhere close to as bad as OAN. But given her enormous cultural impact last 30-40 years, I don't think it's wrong to call her out for elevating some pretty seriously dubious characters and ideas over the years.
Matt probably knows a number of CEOs personally from Dalton and Harvard. That's probably influencing his opinion.
What is Trump's political project though? The only things Trump believes in are tariffs, grifting, and revenge.
The things they like are cutting taxes and suppressing the hippies. I don't think they're necessarily pro-dictatorship, but some of them are anti-anti-dictatorship.
I mean, from their perspective, for as much tariffs hurt business, they can adapt. And for all the other bad things Trump wants to, they believe that if things get bad enough they can just buy some memecoin and Trump will probably back off. Whereas AOC, Bernie Sanders, Lina Kahn, etc. want to destroy their businesses, take all their money, and throw them in prison.
In America's political culture, you could be a "good team player" and still criticize the policies of your team, as well as oppose certain nominations.
In Trump's GOP, you can't: You're either with Trump, or against him.
As I understand, the point of Matt's post is: Whybhave businessmen adopted the same submissive political positions as the GOP?
My impression, at least from the world of finance, is that it's just running on autopilot. They seem to have OVERlearned the lesson that the line always goes up in the long run, so they're acting like it's business as usual. I've heard people who should know better repeating the line "it's a negotiating tactic" about tariffs. I don't know if this is sincerely believed or if this is something we say to prevent clients from panicking.
"they support Trump's overall political project"
A prediction: if, for whatever reason, the Republicans decide to pull legislation for the tax cut and let rates rise, you'll see businessmen collecting pitchforks and torches and marching on the White House chanting, "If no tax cuts, then no fascism either!"
CEOs and investors are risk takers with unwavering faith in their own agency. Trump's creating an environment that's broadly bad for business but also grants world-altering power to whichever lucky businessman gains his ear. Matt is seriously underrating the possibility that some CEOs are willing to gamble world stability because of "nah, I'd win" type thinking.
I've wondered if its a a different angle of this. Many of these businesses are selling to Trump supporters and they may be concerned that if they but not their competitors speak out against a Trump policy, that Trump will go after them and they will negatively impact their brand with his base.
It is shocking how the medical and pharmaceutical lobby let RFK fly through. Like do companies not have an interest in policy that affects them?
Especially when you look at how much big business came out against the ACA and were warning of the apocalypse if it passed. Now we have a crank strangling the future of medical research in this country and they barely lift a finger.
Maybe the Democrats should use Khanist (Khaaaaaan!!!!!) anti-monopolism as a cudgel against their “enemies” next time rather than actually practicing it willy-nilly as they did.
Yes - it's not ideal, but this one-sided hardball can't just go on forever. The ideal situation is no one uses the government to punish their political enemies, but if Republicans won't stop, then Democrats have no choice but to shift us to the second-best outcome where both sides do it instead of just one.
Tit for tat punishment in game theory.
Likely they assumed Trump was just kidding when he said he’d let him “go wild”. They assumed a lot of things.
Really, it was a hope. They’re not used to dealing with someone bent on their destruction, so they hoped he didn’t exist.
Lot of that mentality going around lately. :/
They probably assumed, as did I, that they would be able to quietly lobby and push for a mostly sane set of policies. They underestimated, as did I, the extent to which RFK and similarly incompetent Trump appointees are immune to traditional lobbying. Their only patron is Trump, the only opinion they care for is Trump's, and they simply don't care whether they lobbyists are either right or are powerful.
They didn’t “let” him through. They tried. The worrisome fact is that they simply didn’t have the juice to stop a kook like RFKjr. There are no adults to turn to.
Back on April 1, Jeff Maurer had a good piece about ""Where’s This Shadowy Cabal of Business Elites I Keep Hearing About?...I am unabashedly Team Evil Cabal right now. They are exactly the bloodthirsty profit-mongers we need to step in and restore sanity. I’m told that they only care about the profit and are positively ruthless in pursuit of their interests. And I think that sounds lovely — let’s do that, how do I vote for these people? Do they even need my vote — haven’t they been pulling the levers of our Shamocracy this whole time? But if that’s true, then why don’t they pull the 'don’t tank the economy for no reason' lever? I hate to be a back-seat rapacious profiteer, but that’s what I’d do if I was stealthily manipulating the global economy from a secret lair beneath the Denver airport."
Yeah, Pharma can't stop a Senate-confirmed appointment, only senators can.
I think this is a pretty silly framing. Did companies "let" Lina Khan through? Khan / the anti-monopolist wing threated actual corp. death and they weren't able to stop her appointment. There's obviously limits to corp. power and that's a good thing.
She didn’t threaten corporate death, just breakup. Not like RFK.
I think they worried that mounting a defense would be "look at the pharma companies trying to stop RFK!" and just backfire.
Why would I want my business to get into a giant morass of litigation that may start to be resolved by the end ofTrump’s term? The Democrats failed to get Trump in 4 years, why do we think random corporations are going to fare better and should take the pain? Seems that not being in court at all is far better for your business than prevailing in court is against an antagonistic government that can make your life miserable, particularly if you need them for contracts.
Yes, sometimes it's smart to give into extortion from a very powerful force. But you have to have some trust that Trump will stick to the extortion deal. What do you do if he just comes back for more? He goes after weakness like a shark smelling blood in the water.
I think the correct metaphor is giving the bully your lunch money. If you give it to him, you have set a precedent, not only that he is going to come back for more, but also that the OTHER bullies notice, and they come after your money too.
If this largely succeeds, how long will it be before a Democrat president abuses power this way? What about the next non-Trump Republican?
Another relevant thing is that if you think winning a court case won’t protect you (i.e. the rule of law is going to completely collapse), then frankly your business is pretty much fucked anyway, you’re better off just acquiring guns, gasoline, and canned goods.
Winning a court case over the course of 4 years or just wait for Trump to move on?
If you pay Trump, why do you assume that “Wait for Trump to move on” actually works?
What if he wants you to pay again tomorrow? What if JD Vance is the next president? What if the next Democrat president decides that what is good for the gander is good for the goose?
Hoping that the gangsters won’t keep saying “Fuck you, pay me” doesn’t sound like a good strategy. It’s fine if you literally have no choice, but it’s terrible if you have good alternatives.
Isn’t the Nash equilibrium here to comply and hope your competitor decides to fight?
No,
a) it's a repeated game. This changes the game theory substancially.
b) your opponent here is powerful enough to fight on multiple fronts. Your competitor's fight won't prevent your opponent from continuing to fight you. How many payments will you make until you competitor wins the fight? How likely is it that your competitor's victory helps you (perhaps your competitor only wins a narrow victory that doesn't apply to your situation or benefit you).
No, you take advantage of your competitor fighting to make progress against them while they are distracted by the government. So you will be in a better position once your competitor emerges from the entanglement with a decision that benefits you.
The FT just published an article today, “‘Feed the gorilla’: How corporate America fought Trump’s tariffs threat”, that reports executives have been lobbying Trump heavily, but mainly in private.
That adds some color to the current situation. It begs the question, why are execs afraid of challenging him publicly? Perhaps they’ve found it’s more effective to get results by working back channels instead.
Sucks to be a small business owner who can’t get Trump’s ear.
(The article is paywalled so I can’t share the link directly, unfortunately.)
"Why are execs afraid to challenge him publicly?"
This seems really easy for me to answer:
1. Trump is incredibly image conscious and thin-skinned AF. When he reads that someone 'said something nasty' about him, he absolutely flips the fuck out and wants to punish that person directly. It's revenge, all the way down.
2. Trump has a bunch of people around him who now do what he ask, even if it is stupid, illegal, or both. So if he says "I want to punish X for saying nasty things about Y" there's real risk.
3. Since the made problem for business is tariffs and the tariffs are set by the executive branch more or less making them up out of thin air, the punishment is obvious.
"My company depended on imported string from Malaysia, and I wrote a high profile op-ed that the tariffs of 45% was killing my business. When I went to the white house to ask for a carve-out, I couldn't even get an audience because of what I had said. Later the tariff went up to 80% and my competitor got a carve-out."
If you really follow the implications of this argument to the logical conclusion, you'll realize why it's so important for societies to have competing centers of power that *aren't* tightly focused on near-term profits. It's also one of the reasons Trump is directing so much firepower towards Universities, because the ideological GOP also realizes this.
When we're relying on the CEOs of the likes of small board game companies being the ones willing to call him out on CNN, it's not a good sign.
All the hobby gaming Kickstarters are in shambles.
Something that gets me about this is do we really want workers in America specializing in light manufacturing? I disagree with tariffs, but I understand why someone would want to have more car manufacturing in Michigan for more of those types of jobs. Someone who thinks the US should spend resources building the capacity to make card stock or plastic miniatures doesn't understand comparative advantage and tradeoffs. Those industries are practically the definition of being a middle income country. You can climb out of rural poverty by specializing in making pencils, but you can't maintain the world's richest economy on pencil factories.
Good points, and I'm sure this was all hashed out in the inter-agency debates taking place in the Trump administration, based on years of white papers issued by conservative think tanks that have been considering the best form of tariff policy. And, finally of course, the National Economic Council integrated all the varying views and presented a cogent list of options for President Trump who took time to mull it over, while tirelessly seeking out wise counsel from outside voices before making his final decision.
You just have to trust that these people have heard all the arguments and made the best decision possible and that none of these decisions were done spontaneously or by whim.
The way I look at it is post-NAFTA we lost ~ 3m light manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Mexico says it was 5m but I think this trend line (below) is a better view from our labor market's perspective. We currently have ~ 2m full time Uber / Door Dash / etc. drivers. Would pulling a % of these positions back to the US be on net good? I think so. To me the entry level position within light manufacturing offers more career growth potential than an Uber type 1099 position.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
I've seen you talk about this before, but you only discuss it from the US side. What impact do you think pulling out some significant % of 3m light manufacturing jobs from Mexico to the US would have on Mexico?
To use an example, if we took half those jobs back, then add 1.5 million jobs for the 134 million full time workers in the US. These are good jobs for workers in the US, but probably wouldn't be considered way above average.
In contrast, Mexico with 59 million workers would feel the impact of losing those 1.5 million jobs much worse than the US as they are likely well above average jobs in Mexico.
Now you might say you don't care about the impact on Mexico, but given they are our southern neighbor, do you think their economy getting much worse might have an impact on the US? Could it possible impact immigration to the US as those 1.5 million jobs and the other jobs they support disappear?
It's a great question and it would be a substantial negative impact / shock on Mexico. That's a trade off. I definitely care but the way I think about it is Trump specifically and the GOP generally are worse on-net for Mexico and the Democrats electoral college tops out around 225 without the rustbelt blue wall states. I'm still very much an Obama-era Democrat and it's not surprising to me that his anti-NAFTA rhetoric and Buy American policies resulted in a +3% win in Ohio while Trump won Ohio by 12%.
Honest question: would people rather work for Uber and DoorDash or have a job making textiles in a light manufacturing establishment?
I'm pretty generally just anti this 1099 "contractor" scam for all these VC companies. I think if you work ~ 40 hours a week you should get the benefits as a full time employee. I think a lot of these drivers are getting taken advantage of (e.g., not realize the accrued maintenance cost they're adding to their vehicles). But I also think they aren't career paths either. So from a career path perspective, I do think light manufacturing - as an entry point - offers more paths for growth for an early stage career.
EDIT: I misread that asking for my views. For people in general, yeah ... I think Uber > textiles for the same pay. But using a different example, I think assembly positions at Honda's new Indiana plant would be > than Uber / DoorDash.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/honda-produce-next-civic-indiana-not-mexico-due-us-tariffs-sources-say-2025-03-03/
I don't even think we'd claw back much employment, but capital intensity in US manufacturing is flat or falling, and we're watching in real-time as the rest of the world deploys automation that could be deployed at home just as easily, but isn't because we let the ecosystems slip away over the last two decades.
Agree but then I don't know why you wouldn't claw back that much employment. You still need people to run the factories. Avery James posted that tier I auto OEM supplier that shifted their injection molding production from China to Mexico in like 30 days to meet the USMCA % targets to avoid the tariffs. If the light assembly of the headlights was also here they'd have just shifted the injection moldings here too.
What types of jobs do you think middle income countries should be specializing in?
Assuming a middle income country has aspirations of becoming a high income country, you'd want to "specialize" on the bleeding edge of the innovation curve with the fattest margins. But then you'd still want as much of the supply chain to as vertically integrated as possible.
They can be, and now are being, completely automated from end to end, even in China. It's not even particularly expensive.
This is a capital intensity problem, and the arguments in favor of free trade are leaning on labor arbitrage as if it still meaningfully matters.
It does not. Tesla uses basically the same automation stack in China and in the US, TSMC is employing the same capital plant in Taiwan and the US, Hyundai uses the same physical plant in South Korea and the USA.
It's already become the case that a significant chunk of the automation that American firms install is no longer made at home, nor in Germany or Japan, but in China.
The US needs to deploy capital into the physical world, pronto, or the world will leave us behind.
That means effective deregulation of physical endeavor, re-regulation of digital, moderate currency devaluation, and working with the developed world to settle on a unified tariff schedule to offset Chinese domestic transfers to industry.
You make a good argument, but we didn't need automation under President McKinley and we were at our greatest peak of wealth then.
Hey, hey, hey. Huge, randomly applied tariffs and a level of uncertainty that renders business planning totally impossible are *good* for growth, dontcha know?
Just look at the Q1 GDP numbers!
[SOB]
Here you go: https://archive.ph/nh7Mq
"why are execs afraid of challenging him publicly?"
Perhaps because they're mostly pro-corruption (when it benefits them personally) and have no meaningful principles?
Because criticizing him publicly is the worst way to get what you want from him?
Yeah, what the fuck does MattY expect here? If anything, making their disapproval public would just scare retail investors and crash the stock market.
When the cultural zeitgeist literally is pro-murder of rich businessmen on one side and a bit of protection money on the other it’s not that hard for me to believe why rich businessmen feel better with Trump.
I know actual elected democrats aren’t Luigi people but I mean we chased people to restaurants and to their homes and post memes about murdering them.
Who is we in this sentence.
By "we chased people" here you mean activists and not elected Democrats, and by "posted memes about murdering" you again mean random posters on Twitter and not prominent Democrats, right?
Not prominent Democrats, but polling showed / shows that Mangione has greater support among younger liberals than any other segment
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-support/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The support within the Left seems broader than random posters, with 25% of self-descried Liberals actually supporting the murder itself.
CNN hosted a friendly interview to Taylor Lorenz. Multiple elected Democrats spoke out in support of badgering Republicans at restaurants.
Democratic politicians are more of the stochastic resistance kind of folks. Ominously proclaim that, for instance, a recalcitrant court will “reap the whirlwind,” and then, hey presto, a guy with a gun just appears!
Brilliant!
You're quite well-known here for lazy, performatively partisan arguments, but this one is particularly silly even by your own standards
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/these-judges-ruled-against-trump-then-their-families-came-under-attack-2025-05-02/
“…lazy, performatively partisan arguments…”
That’s unfair! I am totally bi-partisan. Or non-partisan. Or anti-partisan.* Take your pick.
Still, I think the “posts on social media” you cited are qualitatively different from a guy with a Glock and homicidal intent showing up on your front lawn. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.
.
*I don’t know, given the current political climate in the US, how anyone manages to support either of the two mentally ill parties. Sure, you may believe that one is worse than the other, but, really, to be a partisan? No thanks.
Ken doesn’t have standards, don’t flatter him.
If we can't pretend that random posters on Twitter are prominent Democrats, then what are we even doing here?
Random posters on social media and the President of the United States. Man, what's a businessman supposed to do between this Scylla and Charybdis.
Hear me out, what if rich businessmen stopped being assholes?
I think it’s weird that a) you think assholery is something that rich people have a monopoly on and b) you seem to think the people that say “Actually, murdering that CEO was good” are not assholes.
I don't think (a), and I'm not saying (b). What I'm saying is that if it's acceptable for businessmen to kowtow to Trump because they're afraid of retribution for crossing him, perhaps they could also ease up on screwing over sick people and expressing delight about how AI will replace the need for human workers with their demands for things like reasonable working conditions and pay. The business world apparently is OK with being intimidated into compliance with the right's preferred outcomes (fealty to Trump), so why not the same for left outcomes that are more humane and less autocratic?
“…why not the same for left outcomes that are more humane and less autocratic?”
Assuming that whatever outcomes you believe the left wants can actually be realized,* how about Congress passes a law?
.
*Those outcomes cannot be achieved (of course) and come with more autocracy (of course).
Why can't outcomes like "let workers know their shifts more than a couple days in advance" or "don't throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of people using their health insurance" be achieved? I'm not talking fully automated luxury communism here, I'm talking about backing off the ruthless optimization of workers' lives, and allowing people to use the services they've paid for.
My point about C-suite assholery is not a fully formed one, but the gist is that it would be healthier for all of us if they weren't just afraid of Trump's retribution for crossing him, but also of retribution by some kind of representatives of screwed-over customers and workers, ideally in the form of an organized political party and related policy goals.
It's obviously not good to have unstable people on the fringe gun down people in the streets, though it's harder to get viscerally upset about it when you've got a head of government talking about how nice it would be to send American citizens to foreign jails, and who isn't afraid to bully companies and institutions with state power to get his way. A really really bad development over the last year is that the idea we can go back to some kind of normal where all political violence is beyond the pale, but it is definitely not solely the left who's responsible for this darker and more dangerous world.
“Why can't outcomes like ‘let workers know their shifts more than a couple days in advance’ or ‘don't throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of people using their health insurance be achieved?”
For the former, I can’t know the answer in each specific case, but, more importantly, neither can you. For the latter, I assume your assumption is wildly false.
I think it’s exactly this kind of sentiment that is the problem. You’ve reduced the entire behavior of a whole class into one sentence. There literally isn’t any way for the “rich people” to change their behavior in a way that will appease the left other than “stop being rich”, because there are always a bunch of leftists that will hate them for *something* that they did to get rich.
I think it's pretty clear that Luigi Mangione did not hate Brian Thompson just for being rich.
This is not the zeitgest. This is your own mind
What are you talking about? Right wing social media commenters are constantly threatening to murder people. This has been a constant at least since Gamergate.
When the Germans were expelled from France, women who had slept with German officers had their hair cut off. This sort of calibrated, non-lethal shaming is delicious.
What shall we do to the collaborators in four years? Nothing and death are equally silly answers. Their status must be lowered and yet life should go on.
This only works if he leaves with George W Bush-level approval ratings. Otherwise this trend will just go back and forth. Democrat gets elected, has moderately unsuccessful presidency, leaves office with approval rating in the 40s, Republicans go gangbusters trying to destroy the reputations of Democrats. Back and forth and back and forth...
Until a Democrat incites a mob to storm the Capitol, there is no Democratic equivalent of Trump.
I do not expect underemployed former factory workers to be a force for stability. A healthy society can manage a discontented group of blue collar workers whose situation is hardly desperate. However, when the captains of industry go along with the demagogue, things get scary. The founders are some of the richest men in the history of our species. The executives are some of the best paid executives in the history of our species. I expect this group to sacrifice short term profits for the medium term viability of the American project. If people who have tens or hundreds of millions aren’t a force for stability, confiscation begins to look attractive.
You don't have to convince me that Trump is a unique threat, I'm just saying that if the next president also leaves office with a 44% approval rating, the next mini-Trump to get in there will do the same thing to the supporters of the previous administration. Trump has to leave office with approval in like the 20s or so for this sort of thing to stick.
I once read (in a history of Israel) that 60 plus percent of Germans still supported the final solution in 1946. Illiberal opinions are a tough nut to crack.
Right, and there was a foreign campaign of denazification to beat that out of them. Nobody is going to conduct a campaign of deMAGAfication here, so it's up to other Americans to make the case against. At least until MAGA is so unpopular that anybody associated with it is politically toxic.
You can almost hear the New England WASP old money establishment types whispering from the grave, "*Now* do you miss us?"
W gave old money a bad name. His wars were like the Somme in miniature.
I never thought of W as an "old money WASP." Prescott Bush, sure. Maaaybe even Bush Sr (but heavens! that moving to Texas thing!)
honestly, prescott bush wasn’t a true new england wasp because he made his money in the middle west and then moved to connecticut. precisely because he was an arriviste, he followed the strictures more rigidly than his progeny.
Idk I think of that whole family as WASPs cosplaying as cowboys.
he never would become a Yale grad, much less president without his pedigree.
Did you have to go with the weird misogynist example? Are there any men-on-men collaborator punishments?
cutting the hair off of collaborators is hardly misogynist. america imprisons ten men for every woman. is prison misandrist? is your notion of punishment misandrist? why do you default to the idea that punishing women is misogynist?
Because cutting off women's hair has a certain cultural resonance. "If a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, because her hair is given to her as a covering." And punishing women for their sexual activity is an evergreen, eternally popular misogynist activity.
locking a man in a prison cell has a significant effect on his sexuality
And yet, it's not punishing him for his sexual behavior.
having sex with nazis who are occupying your country is blameworthy
Lots of prosecutions.
They're not acting like he's already a dictator. They're acting like he's a thoroughly ruthless, corrupt, petty and law-breaking soft autocrat. Because that's exactly what he is. Shari Redstone isn't imagining things: Trump absolutely could and would order Bondi to interfere with Paramount's merger plans.
Business leaders are acting cowardly, sure. But they're not acting irrationally. Cowardice is often perfectly rational.
I'm not super concerned Trump will successfully launch a coup in 2028 and remain in power, but I am worried this dictatorial behavior isn't an abberation and that we're just going to go back and forth with presidents of both parties ignoring Congress and siccing the bureaucracy on their enemies. Basic liberalism needs a revival.
The GOP needs to be cleaned out from the inside and rebuilt back into a party that believes in the rule of law. If that happens, then it will be more than enough to prevent any problems on the Democratic side. If that doesn't happen, we're all screwed.
Yeah that'd be great. I have no idea how to get from here to there.
No surprise that a cultural resurgence of hyper-masculinity correlates with a historical epidemic of American cowardice.
I assure you that the “hyper” thing you are noticing the resurgence of is not masculinity.
The “alpha male” is a thing that doesn’t really exist, but when people say things like “real alpha males do not have to tell you they are an alpha male”, they aren’t wrong in principle.
Separately, but somewhat related, I remain amazed by my many Trump supporting friends and acquaintances who acted like we were in the great depression when the stock market dropped for 2 days in August of 2024, wouldn't shut up when gas prices went above $4 for 2 months in 2022 and cry about "Pelosi's insider trading" suddenly having nothing to say about the stock market being down nearly 15% since Trump's inauguration, Trump's tariff charades and overall chaotic economic policy that will clearly have downsides. What has to happen for these people to admit they made a terrible mistake? An actual economic calamity that's much worse than The Great Recession. I mean, I know I shouldn't be amazed but it is truly infuriating for someone like me who lives in a Red Bubble in Florida.