Donald Trump apparently expected to make a good impression last week when he attended the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting and met with a room full of prominent American CEOs. By most accounts, however, the gathering was a bit of a disaster: CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported that many of the attendees said that the former president was “remarkably meandering” and “could not keep a straight thought.”
One CEO who attended the closed-door event concluded, “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
This has put the presumptive Republican nominee on the defensive. In fact, in recent days, he’s published multiple items to his social media platform, insisting that the Business Roundtable was actually a great success — despite the fact that some of the CEOs were, as Trump put it, “Biden sympathizers.”
It was against this backdrop that the GOP candidate made a new declaration yesterday. NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that business executives and shareholder representatives should “be 100% behind” him or face termination.
That might sound like an exaggeration. It’s not. The presumptive Republican nominee literally wrote, “Business Executives and Shareholder Representatives should be 100% behind Donald Trump! Anybody that’s not should be FIRED for incompetence!”
To be sure, during Trump’s White House term, there were a great many examples of the then-president trying to bully corporations into submission and targeting businesses that bothered him for one reason or another. As regular readers might recall, Trump went after Goodyear, GM, Harley-Davidson, Nordstrom, Amazon, and AT&T, among others.
In the not-too-distant past, the right condemned moves like these as “gangster government.” Conservatives had no such concerns, however, when Trump embraced these intimidation campaigns from the Oval Office.
After his 2020 defeat, the Republican kept this going, announcing earlier this year that he’s “building a list” of private-sector entities that he considers “woke.” He added he “might just release” his secret list “for the World to see.”
But this week’s missive represents a clear escalation: It’s one thing for a politician to whine about leading American businesses that have bothered him for petty reasons, it’s something else when a leading candidate for the nation’s highest office calls for private-sector leaders to be fired for failing to support his pursuit of power.
There are authoritarian systems in which such rhetoric is common. It’s just not something the United States is accustomed to dealing with.