The most disturbing aspect of Trump’s first 100 days

Too many American businesses are acting like he’s already a dictator

Almost everything Donald Trump does becomes a bizarre, larger-than-life spectacle.

But precisely for that reason, it’s important to remember that “normal” aspects of politics continue to be incredibly relevant to understanding Trump-era politics.

Barack Obama’s single most effective line of attack on Mitt Romney focused on Republican plans to privatize Medicare, and the boring fact that Trump backed away from the GOP’s least-popular idea was an important factor in his rise to power. Similarly, the 2022 midterms were heavily influenced by public backlash to abortion bans, and a crucial strand of the 2024 campaign was Trump backing away from GOP policy commitments in this regard.

Like most newly elected presidents, Trump enjoyed a honeymoon of positive approval ratings after he won the election.

He also had strong political winds at his back. The inflation of 2022-2023 had broken the public’s faith in the Democratic Party’s economic stewardship. A lot of people were upset about the volume of immigrants who’d arrived through irregular channels and exploited loopholes in the asylum system. Trump had largely restored the Republican Party’s traditional status as the preferred political ally of big business. Even though the sharp rise in shootings and murders of 2020-2021 had already faded, crime — a perennially good issue for Republicans — had become salient as a topic of public debate. As I wrote last November in “How Donald Trump Could Succeed,” there was a clear path for him to become a popular and successful president. And as I wrote on Inauguration Day in “Nobody Knows What Trump is Going to Do,” there was an extraordinary lack of clarity regarding the policy agenda he would actually pursue, because he was constantly contradicting himself.

What Trump ultimately decided to do is what most contemporary presidents have done: He’s interpreted a backlash against the other party’s most strident policy activists as an endorsement of his side’s most strident activists.

The response has been predictable, with thermostatic backlash on the issues and plummeting approval ratings for Trump.

This does not, on its own, solve all of the Democrats’ political problems, especially in the Senate, but those problems too are a pretty normal part of politics. Having lost the prior election, Democrats seem leaderless because they literally are leaderless. Being in the minority in Congress leaves you whining on the sidelines, which looks weak and ineffectual because, again, it literally is weak and ineffectual. Democrats now need to do the basic blocking and tackling work of recruiting midterm candidates, writing a policy agenda, and holding a presidential primary, all of which will play out in time. There’s no guarantee that any of this will turn out well, but there are also plenty of obvious opportunities for it to do so.

But despite much of this having broadly normal contours, I think there’s one under discussed way in which it has been not normal.

Trump is making economic policy decisions that have not only engendered backlash from the mass public, they’ve been bad in specific ways for business. There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with a politician making a call that’s bad for a particular company or industry. But normally when that happens, the leaders of the companies that are harmed complain vociferously and try to mobilize political support for their own interests. Under Trump, though, corporate America is acting like they absolutely agree with all the darkest warnings about democracy being on the ballot in 2024. They seem to have decided that America is now a dictatorship, where if you publicly complain about Trump you’ll be sent to the gulag.

I don’t want to defend Trump on this score, because he really is a madman who enjoys abusing power. But this is still the United States of America, and the appropriate response to his actions is for business leaders to act normally, which in this case would mean standing firm in defense of their own interests rather than bandwagoning with a leader who is erratic, impulsive, and deeply unpopular.

The mystery of Amazon’s tariff surcharge

Amazon recently considered attaching a visible “tariff surcharge” to goods when their prices rise as Trump’s trade policies go into effect. The administration got mad about this, yelled at them, and Amazon immediately backed down.

I could take or leave the tariff surcharge as a gambit.

But the tariffs are obviously bad for Amazon’s business. Not only is the increase in the cost structure for goods they sell as a retailer bad for them, but the larger concepts underpinning Trump’s trade ideas are bad for Amazon. Amazon Web Services is a major exporter of services globally, for example, and part of Trump’s fuzzy thinking about trade deficits is a belief that services exports don’t count. Amazon also employs a large blue collar workforce in its warehouses and other facilities, and one of the premises of MAGA economics is that for some reason, these jobs (like construction jobs) don’t count and the only acceptable path forward is for blue collar workers to work specifically in factories.

You would expect a company to speak up about something like this.

That doesn’t mean Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos needs to start talking like a highly partisan Democrat. These are rich businessmen, and if they want to shower praise on Trump for trying to cut their taxes or for appointing business-friendly regulators to various posts, then by all means do it. But Trump is simultaneously hurting their company in tangible ways, while also deriding its contributions to the American economy. That’s the kind of thing people normally complain about.

Similarly, the entire pharmaceutical industry made the bizarre decision not to oppose RFK Jr.’s nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, even though RFK himself quite openly says that he hates this industry and wants to injure their interests.

Whatever calculus went into that immediately failed to pay off, as Trump inaugurated a broad attack on medical research. Some of this seems to be about Kennedy’s bizarre views on health, and some of it is about DOGE’s eccentric ideas about government spending. But a lot of it is using medical research grants as a weapon to pursue unrelated culture war grievances. Politicians are allowed to decide what fights to pick, but normally, if you were to make a business segment collateral damage in an unrelated political dispute, the leaders of those businesses would complain about it. What I’ve heard instead from medical researchers is that pharma executives are “afraid” to get on Trump’s bad side.

And we’re seeing this across the board. Homebuilders, like all industry segments, are inclined to praise some of the Trump administration’s policies. But the combination of tariffs and higher budget deficits, plus an immigration crackdown, is straightforwardly bad for the industry in ways that are also straightforwardly bad for the country.

Why don’t these guys speak up for themselves?

Why is it left to Slow Boring to point out that there are win-win ways to create high-wage blue collar jobs in the construction sector rather than wrecking the global economy to try to turn carpenters into garment manufacturers? Part of the normal give and take of a democratic society is that if you try to screw people over, they complain vocally, and then the public might hear certain criticisms that don’t come from partisan Democrats or even people who are anti-Trump.

Worse than silence

Of course, the business leaders who remain silent are not the worst of the lot.

Even as Jeff Bezos says he wants the Washington Post to mount an intellectual defense of personal liberty and free markets, Amazon has paid tens of millions of dollars to Melania Trump for a vanity documentary. ABC paid $15 million to Trump to settle a bogus defamation lawsuit rather than fighting in court, and Paramount has compromised the integrity of 60 Minutes and is now prepared to fork over its own giant settlement fee in a case most people think that they could win in court.

Companies’ concerns about Trump are not totally misguided.

During his first term, Trump tried to yank a defense contract that Amazon had won in order to punish the Washington Post for its reporting. He had the Justice Department try to block AT&T’s merger with Warner Bros in order to punish CNN for its reporting. Donald Trump is genuinely a bad person who tries to use the powers of his office in inappropriate ways. But it’s worth remembering that the Trump administration lost in court on both counts. There is a cost to litigating, but the way to address it is to fight and win and then complain to the public and to your fellow rich businessmen and make sure the politicians who are messing with you pay a political price.

The United States has existed as a democratic republic for over 200 years now, and this is not really a new scenario or a new playbook.

The most shameful actors of all have, strikingly, been several major law firms, which decided to reach preposterous settlements with Trump in response to extortion rather than putting their faith in the rule of law and their ability to litigate. The law firms that are fighting Trump in court seem to be winning, and Microsoft recently gave one of them a vote of confidence.

Again, to be clear, I am not insisting that every sane person needs to believe that every single thing Trump says and does is wrong. As I’ve written before, Harvard is right to fight Trump’s coercion, but rather than cave with an ignominious settlement, they should fight him with the one hand while acknowledging the legitimacy of some conservative critiques with the other. The Princeton faculty just took a vote to bar the idea of issuing campus-wide statements on political issues, saying they should limit themselves to commenting on university administration. That’s a smart idea and an example of institutions trying to show that they are responsive to trends in society. But there is no basis for this belief that every company and business lobby in the country needs to be cowering in terror of Trump.

A stack of self-fulfilling prophecies

A noteworthy counterexample is the behavior of certain genuinely Trump-friendly institutions, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Free Press.

These are right-of-center outlets, but they’re also run by human beings who have eyes and ears and the capacity for independent judgment, so they occasionally run blistering articles taking issue with Trump over some particular policy or action. Because that’s how politics works! Throughout my career, I have written articles criticizing administrations I voted for and defending administrations I voted against.

To an extent, I think a strength of Rupert Murdoch’s stewardship of the Wall Street Journal is precisely that he is committed to the view that Democrats’ dark warnings about Trump as a dictator are wrong. If you think he’s not a dictator and you think he’s worth supporting because he’s right on the majority of issues, then you act like a normal person living in a democracy and criticize him when you think he’s wrong.

The only way for Trump to actually become a dictator is for everyone to stop the normal political process of speaking up when they disagree with him and ensuring that his overreach generates backlash.

Obviously, when liberals complain about Trump as an authoritarian menace to the rule of law, their intention is not for business leaders to respond this way! What they want to do is recruit people into the resistance. Which would be great. But we do also seem to be giving people, especially business leaders, either a reason or an excuse to cave to illegitimate demands or downplay normal criticisms of Trump's actions. And I think that’s the single most disturbing thing that I’ve seen over the course of the first 100 days.

Of course, Trump has done plenty that is directly horrifying and harmful in a first-order way. At the same time, “he’s going to do terrible things that harm people” was baked into the cake the moment he won the election. He’s done terrible things, Democrats have criticized the terrible things, he’s become unpopular, and now Democrats mostly need to focus on self-help and improving their public image.

But what ought to be happening is that as his approval rating sinks, frontline Republicans start distancing themselves from him.

That’s what would actually check his power and run the risk of him facing real legislative defeats. And yet despite the big shift in public opinion, I still don’t see stakeholders in the health care industry complaining vocally about the harms of Medicaid cuts. This is putting a bit of a floor under Trump and also ensuring that he’s not being treated like a toxically unpopular president by Congress.

I don’t really know what’s going on here. But Ryan Petersen of the shipping company Flexport has been quite publicly outspoken about tariffs and recently came to DC to lobby. And I think he smartly wrapped that up with a patriotic post celebrating the First Amendment.

There is obviously something a bit odd about someone feeling like he has to note that he didn’t fear being locked up for criticizing the president’s policies. But he is correct on the merits, and I also think that encouraging people to lean in to the first amendment and the proud American tradition of free speech is tactically shrewd here. This is America, and it’s pathetic for powerful business leaders to be whining about how they’re afraid to anger the president.