Chief executives of some of America’s largest companies will meet privately with Donald Trump later on Thursday, and many CEOs who were once critical of his unprecedented conduct appear increasingly open to the former president’s return to office, a Guardian analysis has found.
The private audience with the former president will take place at the quarterly gathering of the Business Roundtable, a powerful Washington lobbying group that advocates for the interests of chief executives of big US firms. Joe Biden was also invited; his chief of staff will attend while the US president is abroad, a Business Roundtable spokesperson said.
The meeting comes less than five months before the election and less than four years after CEOs raised the alarm about political polarization and threats to democracy when Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and incited an insurrection at the US Capitol.
Back then, the Business Roundtable – whose members include Apple’s Tim Cook, General Motors’ Mary Barra and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon – led a chorus of condemnation from corporate America. “The country deserves better,” the Business Roundtable said in a statement on 6 January 2021, calling on Trump and his administration “to put an end to the chaos and to facilitate the peaceful transition of power”.
Today, with Biden and Trump tied in the polls, Trump can expect a far warmer reception from corporate bosses. “The reality is … we as CEOs and we as a Business Roundtable, we’re going to work with whoever is in the White House,” Chuck Robbins, the lobby group’s chair and the CEO of Cisco Systems, told Fortune in March.
“The way we think about it is, if we have a Trump administration or if we have a Biden administration, regardless, there are going to be things we can align on in both,” Robbins said.
While corporate America’s views appear to have changed, Trump’s have not. The former president still has not accepted the results of the 2020 election, nor has he committed to accepting the 2024 outcome. He maintains that the supporters who he urged to storm the Capitol “were there with love in their heart”.
And Trump and his campaign have promised a range of divisive and anti-democratic initiatives if he is re-elected, from mass firings of non-partisan government officials to the weaponization of the US Department of Justice against his perceived enemies.
Yet a second Trump term promises benefits for CEOs and their companies in a variety of policy areas, from lucrative tax breaks – Trump’s recent pledges include a “business class big tax cut” – to sweeping rollbacks of Biden-era efforts to promote market competition and strengthen worker power.
“It has always been clear that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are not what is going to preserve democracy, and that the CEOs of the Fortune 500 work for their investors who demand insatiable amounts of profit,” said Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive advocacy group.
“If they think that President Trump is perilous for democracy but good for profits, I think it has always been clear where they are going to land on this question.”
‘A sad time for our country’
A few days after the 2020 election, dozens of CEOs gathered on a hastily organized 7am Zoom call to discuss Trump’s refusal to accept that he had lost.
The executives met “to share observations and talk about what possible roles they might play in encouraging a smooth transfer of power”, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who has spent decades counseling chief executives, and who convened the post-election Zoom, later wrote.
Attending the call were the heads of some of America’s largest corporations, including Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Blackstone, Comcast and Goldman Sachs.
The next day, the Business Roundtable, which counted many of the attending CEOs as members, issued a high-profile statement congratulating Biden and Kamala Harris and urging “elected officials and Americans across the political spectrum to work in good faith to find common ground”.
A similar pattern played out in the days surrounding the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol: CEOs and their companies quickly distanced themselves from Trump. Many pledged to stop making campaign contributions to Republican politicians who voted against certifying the election results. Executives were portrayed in the media as patriots who put their self-interest aside and their reputations at risk to speak out.
“It’s just a sad time for our country,” Robbins, the Cisco boss, told the New York Times. “At a time where we have so many challenges, the partisanship is astounding.”
“Our leaders must call for peace and unity now,” tweeted Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, on 6 January. “There is no room for violence in our democracy. May the one who brings peace bring peace to our country.”
While the full list of attendees of the 2020 Zoom call has not been published, the Guardian contacted a dozen companies and trade groups whose current or previous CEOs or members were reported to have joined the call or expressed concerns about Trump’s commitment to the democratic process, such as Cisco and Salesforce.
The Guardian sought comment from the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, another corporate lobbying group, which on January 6 called for Trump’s cabinet to consider removing him from office using the 25th amendment.
One company declined to comment. Of the other firms and trade groups, none responded to inquiries about whether they remained concerned about Trump’s commitment to democracy, or whether they would speak out if Trump were to express an unwillingness to accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses.
‘They’ve done the math’
Corporate America’s relationship to Trump is complicated. “The narrative that the business community is hedging their bets and that CEOs are ‘softening towards Donald Trump’ is escalating and fast becoming a fact-free echo chamber of unsupported pronouncements,” Yale’s Sonnenfeld argued earlier this year.
Few chief executives of large US companies are personally donating to Trump’s campaign, Sonnenfeld noted. “The money trail, or lack thereof, speaks to the frayed ties between Trump and the business world.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Sonnenfeld pointed to a number of policy issues on which CEOs disagreed with the former president. Chief executives “are pro-immigration reform. They are not xenophobes. And … they are not protectionist. They believe in a globalized economy,” Sonnenfeld said.
“They also believe in social harmony, either out of personal character, patriotic values or enlightened self-interest. They don’t want furious communities tearing apart the social fabric. They don’t want shareholders screaming at them. They don’t want employees sabotaging each other. They depend on social harmony to navigate their businesses.”
“Today, there’s no support of any public CEO for Trump, even though … the polls are far more favorable to him than they were in the earlier two elections,” Sonnenfeld said.
But experts and advocates noted that on a range of issues – among them, tax cuts, efforts to undermine collective bargaining and worker power, and regulatory rollbacks, especially environmental protections – CEOs have plenty of reasons to expect that a second Trump term could prove lucrative.
“We actually don’t need to overanalyze it,” said Michael Linden, a former Biden administration official who is now a fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “At the end of the day, corporations and CEOs have always liked low taxes. They’ve always liked deregulation.
“For all of Donald Trump’s heterodoxy on some issues, [on] those things” – taxes and regulations – “he is standard. He is indistinguishable from Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney or George W Bush or pick your standard Republican.”
“I think they’ve done the math,” said Timi Iwayemi of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks corporate political influence. “They can say, ‘We’ve already seen Trump. We had Trump 1.0. Yeah, sure, it was bad, but it wasn’t the end of America. America is still here.’”
‘The stakes are huge, and they are real’
One of Trump’s few legislative achievements as president was a huge tax cut that permanently slashed the corporate tax rate by 40%.
A recent report by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep) found that the law saved some of America’s biggest and most profitable companies $240bn in taxes between 2018 – the first full year it was in effect – and 2021.
Walmart, for instance, paid an average effective tax rate of 31% between 2013 and 2016. After Trump signed his tax cuts into law, the company’s average rate fell to 17%, Itep found. The change saved the consumer goods giant $9bn between 2018 and 2021.
Salesforce, meanwhile, paid only $175m in federal taxes over the first five years of the Trump tax cuts, according to previous Itep research. Salesforce brought home about $6bn in profit during the same period.
“Obviously, the US government is a large customer of Salesforce, and depending on who’s in office, it creates a whole stir with a different part of our employee base,” Salesforce’s Benioff told Bloomberg in January. “So that’s just a reality. But the reality is that, hey, we are the same company regardless of when that election is going to occur and regardless of who that president will be.”
Trump has promised to reduce the corporate tax rate even further if he wins a second term. But corporations are gearing up for an even bigger tax fight next year.
Cuts to individual income and estate taxes, as well as business “pass-through” rates – changes that overwhelmingly benefited wealthy and white Americans – are set to expire next December.
“Whether they just expire, whether they get replaced by something, whether they get extended, is a massive question, and it will be a question that Congress has to deal with and the president has to deal with one way or the other,” said Equitable Growth’s Linden. “And so the stakes are huge, and they are real.”
For corporations, these stakes are even higher following their failure earlier this year to secure passage of a congressional tax deal that would have rolled back some of the taxes meant to pay for Trump’s 2017 tax law.
Companies and their trade groups lobbied aggressively for these provisions, which could have saved them hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, the Guardian previously reported.
“I think they assume under Trump they will not only get an extension of the status quo, which is very beneficial to them, but they will also have another bite at the apple to get even more than they currently have,” said Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative.
‘A huge turn-off to business leaders’
In other policy areas, a second Trump administration would have more leeway to unilaterally pursue an agenda friendly to big business – and would enter office with a savvier understanding of how to achieve it.
“In 2024 Trump will be a much more professional operation,” said the Revolving Door Project’s Iwayemi. “They have a much more clear and deep understanding of the executive branch. And they would have a team that would be fully equipped.”
Last year, the rightwing Heritage Foundation published “Project 2025”, a policy-by-policy, agency-by-agency roadmap to “dismantle the administrative state”, as the organization’s president described it.
Project 2025 includes a range of policy levers that would roll back efforts to promote economic competition and protect workers. Many of the recommendations align with positions that corporate interests have already taken.
For instance, Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved new requirements for public companies to disclose some of the risks that climate change presents to their businesses.
The final SEC rule was weaker than the agency’s original proposal, and even incorporated recommendations from the Business Roundtable and other trade groups not to require companies to track or report on the climate impacts of their supply chains.
Nevertheless, immediately after the rule was finalized, Republican state attorneys general and the US Chamber of Commerce, another corporate lobbying group, sued the agency.
“Everybody here [at the Business Roundtable] is committed to climate change, to controlling our carbon footprint,” Robbins told CNBC the day after the SEC finalized the climate disclosure rule. “But some of the requirements – first of all, we’re not sure it’s the SEC’s remit to do that. But secondly … it’s just an incredible amount of work that actually increases costs at a time when we’re talking about inflation …”
Project 2025 goes even further, suggesting that Congress prohibit the SEC from requiring these types of disclosures in the first place.
It also encourages repeal of other reporting rules that became law after the 2008 financial crisis, such as a requirement that public companies disclose the ratio of CEO compensation to median worker pay. The Business Roundtable spent years opposing federal efforts to require companies to disclose this measure of executive compensation.
Another agency that has drawn borderline-obsessive corporate ire is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which under Biden has taken a far more aggressive approach to challenging corporate power than any administration – Republican or Democratic – for decades.
Earlier this year the FTC finalized a landmark ban on non-compete clauses. The ban, as the FTC chair, Lina Khan, described it, helps make sure workers “have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business or bring a new idea to market”.
“Something that I think Americans have been hungry for, for a long time” is for government “in a muscular way [to] protect them not just as consumers but also as workers and small businesses from serious abuse from big corporations”, said Elizabeth Wilkins, a former White House official who recently stepped down as the FTC’s chief of staff.
“This is stuff that people want, but … it’s also stuff that big corporations have been getting away with for a long time,” said Wilkins, now a fellow at the anti-monopoly American Economic Liberties Project. “I am sure that they aren’t happy about it.”
The day after the FTC finalized the ban on non-competes, the Business Roundtable filed a lawsuit to stop what it called “this unwarranted regulatory overreach”.
“The Federal Trade Commission is a huge turn-off to business leaders,” said Yale’s Sonnenfeld.
“Corporations recognize that there’s an alphabet soup of government agencies with the power to properly enforce longstanding laws and, when necessary, crack down [on] corporate exploitation,” said Iwayemi.
They “recognize that if you pull any acronym out of the pot – take the SEC or the FTC or whichever – they have the potential to sell out public interest. And that is just much more likely under the Trump administration.”
‘They are not the central heroes of the economic story’
Despite their complaints about the Biden agenda, the fact remains that US corporations have thrived during Biden’s time in office, routinely reporting record profits and awarding sky-high CEO pay.
In 2023, the median head of an S&P 500 company took home more than $16m, an increase of nearly 13% from the previous year, according to a recent AP and Equilar analysis. Workers’ wages grew only 4%, the report found.
Meanwhile, corporations are salivating over hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax incentives created by Biden-era legislation to tackle climate change and spur domestic investment in infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing.
And far from freezing out corporate America – as some progressives had hoped – the Biden White House has aggressively solicited executives’ input. Wilkins described the administration conducting “an enormous amount of outreach to the corporate community”.
“They engage, for sure,” Robbins told CNBC in March. “There’s open communication – there always is. So that’s not the issue.”
Still, bosses appear increasingly fed up with Biden’s rhetoric.
While the Biden administration has “been great for business” and most CEOs are not actively supporting Trump’s re-election bid, that “doesn’t mean that they’re pro-Biden,” Sonnenfeld said.
“There are plenty of issues that they have [with Biden] on certain areas. They don’t like being vilified on the tax front, even though maybe some should pay some higher taxes. They smart on setting up a class warfare.”
The president “puts workers at the center of the economic universe: unions and labor power and competition and higher taxes on the rich”, said Linden. Corporations “really get offended when people suggest that they are not the central heroes of the economic story. They really don’t like that.”
Trump might praise wealthy CEOs, or at least refrain from saying they should pay higher taxes or suffer new consumer protections.
Yet one of the former president’s defining characteristics remains his fanatical pursuit of grudges against perceived enemies and those who he believes have slighted him.
This track record suggests that CEOs’ silence today – perhaps a result of Trump’s coin-flip odds of ending up back in the White House – may not guarantee their protection from his vindictiveness tomorrow.
That, however, is a gamble that many executives appear willing to make.
For CEOs: “There may be limited downside to making nice noises about Trump,” suggested Rosanna Weaver, a consultant for the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. “If Trump is elected you have some credit with him. If Biden is elected, he is unlikely to hold the same kind of vindictive grudge that Trump would.”
