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The major stock market indexes were not open over the weekend, but as The New York Times reported, Wall Street was not quiet. Executives, many of whom backed Donald Trump’s candidacy last year, responded to the White House’s trade tariffs with “anger, anxiety, frustration, and fear.”
The Times’ report added, “One prominent deals lawyer described himself as ‘flabbergasted’ as he grappled with how far the share prices of his clients had fallen. A top Goldman Sachs executive summed up the frustration with Mr. Trump succinctly: Someone has to stop him.”
Other prominent voices have spoken up in similar ways. Billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman — who backed Trump’s candidacy and publicly defended the then-candidate’s economic agenda during the 2024 campaign — wrote over the weekend, “Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe. The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative.”
Ackman added, “This is not what we voted for.”
Reactions like these reminded me of a recent Washington Post column from Catherine Rampell, a new MSNBC anchor, who marveled at the degree to which Wall Street is “shocked that President Donald Trump is destroying the robust economy he inherited.”
Were any of these people watching the same campaign the rest of the country saw? Trump’s self-sabotaging agenda was not subtext; it was explicit text, often delivered in all caps. He devoted much more time in his rally speeches to trade wars and fantasies of retaliation against personal enemies than to corporate tax breaks. And some commentators (ahem) tried to convey that even if those precious tax cuts passed, there’s a lot more to capitalism than low taxes.
The column was published two weeks before the White House rolled out its radical tariffs agenda, sending global markets into a tailspin.
Rampell added, “C-suite executives and market analysts have no excuses for getting Trump’s economic agenda wrong. They are paid to make accurate predictions and to follow incremental regulatory and legislative developments. They were supposed to know that the ‘Tariff Man’ might raise tariffs, and that the guardrails were being dismantled. They went into this eyes-wide-open.”
If you spend enough time online, you’ll probably see references to the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. I’ve seen this summary making the rounds, and it’s is as good as any: “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party refers to a parody of regretful voters who vote for cruel and unjust policies (and politicians) and are then surprised when their own lives become worse as a result.”
It appears to have started in 2015 with someone who wrote, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
The more Trump’s Wall Street backers recoil in reaction to the agenda they helped advance, the more the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party comes to mind.