Donald Trump met behind closed doors with congressional Republicans last week, and while everyone kept up appearances before and after the gatherings, some conceded that the former president didn’t exactly impress his audience. One person in the room said it was “like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.”
The presumptive GOP nominee had another chance to make a better impression later in the day, during a gathering with corporate executives. As NBC News reported, that appearance wasn’t a success, either.
Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC. ... Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on “Squawk Box.”
One CEO who attended the closed-door event said plainly, “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
To be sure, this doesn’t come as a surprise. To know anything about the former president is to know that he delivers long, meandering remarks; he can’t maintain a straight thought; and no matter the topic, the guy simply can’t overcome his profound ignorance and indifference toward reality.
But on the same day that members of the Business Roundtable were confronted with Trump’s incoherence, The Wall Street Journal published a related report noting that prominent private-sector leaders are nevertheless “flocking” to the Republican candidate.
The obvious question, of course, is why CEOs would flock to a White House hopeful whom they know “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” As it happens, the answer to that question is obvious, too.
“The November faceoff between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump presents big business with a big choice to make over the coming months: support an incumbent who will bring stability but potentially reduced profits or back a loose cannon who might threaten democracy but not its bottom line,” my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown explained in his latest column.
Not surprisingly, the executives’ bottom line is proving to be their top priority, though they might not have fully thought this through.
I’m reminded of a quote from last week. Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents the city’s top business leaders, told Politico that Republicans have told her that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”
The idea that Democrats are putting capitalism at risk is plainly bonkers. Indeed, three-and-a-half years into Biden’s term, the United States’ economy is easily the strongest in the world, and international investors are throwing money at American businesses.
But those private-sector leaders unconcerned about the fate of democracy are every bit as misguided.
Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund executive who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, told Politico, “You need a democracy to have effective capitalism. If you don’t, you get cronyism. You get oligarchy. You get crony capitalism. You get arbitrary and capricious administration to the law, which reduces people’s tendency to invest in your country.”
It’s an important point. I realize there will be some — inside corporate boardrooms and out — who look at the 2024 presidential race and effectively say, “Democracy is all well and good, but I’m more concerned about my wallet.”
That calculus is misguided, in part because Trump is unlikely to deliver the economic utopia he’s promising — he’s already failed once — and in part because moving away from democracy is inherently bad for the economy.
It’s something Business Roundtable members might want to keep in mind as they weigh whether to rally behind a presidential hopeful who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.