Trump vs. The Business Community

[EasyAce]

By Steve Chapman
http://reason.com/archives/2017/08/20/trump-vs-the-business-community

Most business executives fumed and groused for the eight years Barack Obama was in the White House. He
was a former community organizer who had never met a payroll, and those in the corporate boardrooms thought
he was no friend of free enterprise . . .

. . . Now, instead of a liberal lawyer in the White House, CEOs have one of their own. And they're finding it's not
everything they hoped. The stock market and other economic indicators look about the same as they did before
Donald Trump took office. In Obama's final six months, the economy added an average of nearly 181,000 jobs
per month. In Trump's first six months, it added 179,000 per month. GDP growth has even slowed a bit.

More troublesome at the moment is Trump's insistence on defending Confederate monuments and stoking white
racial resentments. In recent days, so many CEOs resigned from the president's two business advisory councils
that Trump closed them down. Some of the executives no doubt were genuinely upset at the president's coddling
of bigots and his inability to behave with a dignity befitting his office. Some were fearful of alienating customers
who find Trump toxic.

Other business executives are edging away from the president as though he were an erratic panhandler, and for
the same reason: Best not to be close to him if he flips out. You don't want to have to stand there in silent
mortification, as White House chief of staff John Kelly had to do the other day, while the president makes a fool
of himself on national TV. It would not be good for your company or your career . . .

. . . But even before Trump's Charlottesville debacle, he was not covering himself with capitalist glory . . . His
recurring message is that any executive who doesn't do as Trump wishes can expect retribution from the most
powerful man on earth. Obama was not the friend CEOs think the president of the United States should be. But
in Trump, they're finding out what it's like to have a real enemy.