Aside from Trump fan Bill Ackman and a few other outspoken mavericks, America’s corporate leaders are staying remarkably quiet about the Trump versus Biden election. But talk to them on background, and the reason for their extreme discretion becomes clear. Everyone from big name CEOs to former chiefs serving on boards and as executive chairmen to heads of private companies to famed asset managers disdain both candidates. And if they spoke frankly about either, they’d say stuff so damning that no matter who’s elected, the moguls might hurt their chances of clinching a controversial takeover or winning favor among the regulators in the next administration.
That generally negative view of Trump and Biden came through strongly in interviews this writer recently conducted with four business titans. I promised each one anonymity, and instead of covering a list of issues one at a time, asked them to simply say what they liked and disliked about each candidate and their policies. We’ll name these ultras for the names on Mount Rushmore. “George” (for Washington) is a major fund manager who has also been a CEO, and served on boards of many Fortune 500 members. “Tom” (for Thomas Jefferson) is former chief of a major manufacturer who's strongly involved in setting strategy for another F500 player. “Abe” (for Lincoln) is cofounder and CEO of a private, highly successful web-based financial services firm, and “Ted” (for Theodore Roosevelt) is CEO of a F500 consumer services giant.
Speaking the morning after the first debate, Tom was incredulous at the choices. "It's incredible to think that these are the two best candidates in the country," he marvels. "It's hard to understand why Biden's team agreed to the debate knowing he would be that way. I just felt sorry for what he was going through. As for Trump, he came across very well. But if he'd been debating someone in their prime, he wouldn't have looked nearly as good." The difference in appearance and comportment was striking, he notes. "It didn't look like a three-year age difference, but more like a 20-year age difference," he observes. "The problem for Biden now is that if he's reelected and he's incapacitated, you can't sure who'll be running the country."
How CEOs view the matchup of Biden vs. Trump
All four of the interviewees characterized their politics as either fully independent, or center left to center right. “I’m not one of these crazy conservatives. I voted for Bill Clinton and for Al Gore,” avows George, who now favors Trump. “I love where America stood in the ’50s and ’60s when the difference between the Democrats and Republicans was tiny. You had extremists, but mainly centrists. The country works better when the range is mainly between the center left and center right. I’m happy there.”
Tom declares that he’s traditionally been Republican, but "truly a moderate," and he also voted for Bill Clinton. This year he’s undecided, but leaning Trump. Abe describes himself as “center left” and plans to back Biden, adding that “I hate both the far left and the far right.” As for Ted, he’s “traditionally Republican” but confirms the overriding theme of these discussions: He holds both Trump and Biden in extremely low esteem. Right now, Ted is inclined toward the former president, rather than the current one.
Finding fault with Trump’s character
The issues aside, the group characterized both Trump and Biden as poor choices, the former for his questionable character, the latter for his age and infirmity. George and Ted also believe that Biden’s gone over the top in bashing business. “I don’t find fault with Trump’s policies so much, I find fault with him as a person and politician,” intones George. “I voted for him in 2020, then after the Jan. 6 raid on the Capitol, regretted that I’d backed him. He’s an ass who can’t keep his mouth shut. He creates fights that aren’t necessary; he digs a grave by being insulting to people. His advisors in the business world keep telling him, he agrees, and then he does it again! Instead of bringing people to the center, he’s pushing them away.”
For George, Biden’s apparent cognitive problems portend that America will get what he considers an even worse world leader than Biden or Trump. “Healthwise, I don’t know who he is, and I don’t think he knows who he is,” says George. “He’s on another planet. In voting for him what I’m doing is voting for Kamala Harris," whom he deems "not a good choice.”
Tom agrees, stating that “Biden is well past his sell date, and the backup is worse. I don’t see how he makes it through four more years. I’m scared to death we get another Woodrow Wilson thing when someone else runs the government, not the president.” But Trump’s careening conduct also bothers Tom. “I would say neither is an exemplar, neither one I’d point to and say to my kids, ‘This is what you need to be like.’ They’re not role models.” Abe worries that Trump’s extreme unpredictability could trigger greater conflict abroad and worsen America’s already dire budgetary problems. “I’m looking for stability,” he says, “and the most stable outcome is that Biden gets reelected and we have a Republican House, Senate, or both, so he’s hamstrung.” He asserts that it’s in second Democratic administrations when Washington’s divided that America benefits from periods of relative calm and fiscal restraint, notably the case in both the Clinton and Obama presidencies.
Ted has a highly original take: Trump would be mainly an absentee POTUS this time around. “In his first term, he had good people around him like Mnuchin and Cohn,” he says, referring to Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic advisor. “We spoke the same language, and they understood the importance of the business community. If Trump wins, he’ll continue to be erratic, but my expectation is that he won’t spend much time in the office. He’ll just say that he righted a wrong and go play golf and stay away from Washington. Hopefully the same type of patriotic guys will fill the void, but we don’t know that. With Trump, you just don’t know what you’re going to get.” Ted frets that a far less enlightened team could take charge this time while Trump relaxes pounding his drives.
In Ted's view, the prospects of a second Biden term is even worse because the current administration is relentlessly antibusiness. “The Biden administration’s been just the opposite of the Trump administration,” he says. “The meetings Biden has for business leaders is all for show. It’s not authentic. Our company will not be used by attending."
The bottom line, says Ted, is that America faces “two choices between bad and worse,” between “Trump, who’s anything but an admirable person,” and Biden, who’s imposed the toughest regulatory regime in decades on the private sector and whose cabinet rates as “the weakest and most political in many years.”
Adds George, “Biden’s gone way outside the normal left-right calipers on economic policy,” tagging the administration’s historic embrace of European-style industrial policy. “Under Biden, we’re moving fast toward socialism. The race offers frankly a lousy choice. But as of now, you have to hold your nose and vote for one of them, and with Trump, at least what you got before is better than what we have now. But if someone like Joe Manchin shows up on the Dem side to take Joe’s place, I’m in, baby!”
Biden’s immigration and energy policies draw fire
Two of the interviewees bashed Biden’s immigration stance. “We’ve given up proving who’s coming into the country, and we have to get control of the border, which is what makes this such an important election. That’s why I’m backing Trump even after what happened on Jan. 6 and his crazy behavior,” says George. Tom, the manufacturing CEO, charges that Biden has brought “a disaster on the immigration front.” He’s anything but anti-immigration, pointing out that the twin drivers of GDP are the growth in productivity and population. “If we look at nonimmigrant growth, it’s declining,” he says. “We need immigrants to fill the workforce and support economic expansion, but we should be smart about it. We need to control who comes into the country and protect the border. It’s amazing how out of control it’s gotten in the last four years.” He marvels that only a month ago, 25,000 citizens from China, our direst economic and geopolitical rival, poured stateside over the Mexican border.
Biden’s “go green” and anti-fossil-fuel campaigns threaten to hammer our future prosperity, Tom asserts. “It really bothers me that they don’t talk about a total energy solution, about promoting natural gas and nuclear,” he argues. “Biden’s so wed to wind and solar. One of the biggest drivers of GDP is inexpensive, reliable energy. And we’ll have so much more demand for energy in the digital age. His ban on new gas export plants makes no sense.” A big reason America has “done so well” on reducing greenhouse gases, he says, is that cheap natural gas is rapidly replacing far costlier coal for electricity generation, a trend driven by pure market forces that should remain unfettered.
The panelists are split both on what Trump or Biden will bring to foreign policy
Two of the three panelists who addressed trade policy agreed that the protectionist stance toward China, embraced by both Trump and Biden, is the correct one. These captains of commerce aren’t Reagan- or even Bill Clinton–style free traders. In their view, the threat posed by China merits strong retaliation. “On China, Trump was right in imposing big tariffs, and Biden’s been right following that policy,” says Ted. Still, Abe cautions that while in power Trump was indiscriminate in throwing duties on imports—using the campaign to boost his macho image. “In using tariffs, he was just being a strongman, showing he has a hard way of winning. The approach was, ‘If you do any wrong to the U.S., I’ll throw tariffs on you.’ But on China he had the winning argument, as does Biden. You can argue about the impact on inflation and jobs, but it fits the reality that China’s been a bad actor and not interested in being a global participant but winning by manipulating its currency, stealing technology, and bending the rules. We see that in our industry.”
Tom disagrees. “They’re both wrong on trade,” he told me. “Even liberal economists agree that tariffs amount to a middle-class tax increase and hit GDP growth. I’m sympathetic to supporting some critical industries. But once you open the door, an administration can always come up with a rationale for why a politically powerful industry is ‘critical’ and needs protection.” Tom states that he’d like to see a reduction in current tariffs, and both candidates scrap their proposal for far higher trade levies to come.
On foreign policy, the group’s more or less united in backing Biden’s strong support for Ukraine and Israel. But the views on Trump’s posture on the international stage varied widely, with two praising the clout of his tough guy persona while one of the pair slammed his tepid support for Ukraine, and another CEO predicting that a Trump redux would threaten to trigger cataclysmic conflicts. “When he was president, the world for whatever reason had more respect for us,” says George. “You can’t compare Trump to Reagan, but with Reagan it was ‘Take no prisoners, if you fool around with us.’” That was a consistent policy under the Gipper, he adds. But Trump’s weapon is his sheer unpredictability, which—although not a statesmanlike approach—in his opinion actually worked. “Adversaries will not mess with Trump because they don’t know what he’ll do,” George continues. “That’s not a good solution in the long term, but it’s good for now.”
Tom credits Trump’s hardball tactics for goading our European allies into greatly raising their support for NATO. “Biden keeps talking about the importance of NATO and the need to keep it going,” says Tom. “That gives the European members the idea that they can spend less and the Americans will cover for them. But Trump was the better negotiator. He got the Europeans thinking the U.S. might get out of there unless they spent more, so they did. In negotiations between countries the ‘unreasonable’ guy is the one more likely to get something reasonable done. And that was Trump.” Tom, however, thinks that Biden should do far more to bolster the Ukrainian resistance, and that Trump’s failure to express all-out support for the brave nation under siege is a mistake. “If we’ve learned anything from World War II,” Tom insists, ”it’s that if you’re facing a despot and you give him a little bit, and saying you’re done, that doesn’t stop him. He’ll just keep trying to conquer new territory.”
Biden’s following a sound foreign policy, says Ted, while Trump’s approach would spread instability and further embolden Russia. “Trump’s approach is so ego-driven that he risks causing new wars through sheer belligerent talk,” Ted declares. “At the same time, Biden been right on Ukraine and Trump is wrong. If Russia controls Ukraine, you have the reemergence of imperial Russia.” Letting that happen, he concludes, would prove our biggest foreign policy mistake since waging war in Vietnam.
Both Trump and Biden are ignoring the menace of overwhelming deficits and debt
Three of the superstars stressed that America’s facing a fiscal disaster that both candidates are ignoring. To make matters worse, they’re proposing policies that would deepen the looming crisis. “The deficit, that’s Biden’s middle name,” says George. “It got worse under Trump, but just look at the spending explosion since Biden took charge! I’ve seen one report that if we operated on the same budget outlays as in 2019, and had today’s revenues, we’d have a balanced budget!”
For Tom, both Biden and Trump are driving toward a fiscal train wreck, from different directions. “Neither one has a sustainable policy,” he says. “Trump lowered taxes and wants to lower them some more, and Biden spent a lot more and wants that to continue. They’re both hiking GDP with big deficit spending in different ways. Neither approach is smart, and neither is a long-term policy. Neither candidate will address the big one, entitlements.” For Tom, Biden’s proposal to lift corporate levies and rates on the rich won’t even dent the problem. The combination of huge federal spending increases and deep tax cuts for the middle class, he says, guarantees that in the future, the average family will need to pay far more—because the middle class is where the huge pool of income needed to bring revenues and spending in balance resides. Yet neither candidate will acknowledge that their policies are mortgaging the future not just of coming generations, but today’s workers if, say, a sudden spike in our burgeoning borrowing costs forces a sudden, draconian jump in taxes.
Ted fears that Trump will push through another populist reduction in levies that will ignite just such a disaster. “Then he’ll just deficit spend even more to give the economy more of a sugar high,” he says. “It’s similar with Biden, only in his case the increase in deficits comes from industrial policy, for things like the chips, green, and infrastructure acts, all of which have uncertain outcomes. What’s clear is that the corporate tax cuts under Trump and all the corporate welfare under Biden have driven the stock market to new highs. It doesn’t seem like a great government aim to me to drive up stock prices.”
You might think policies that have pushed the valuations of the companies that they run, and where they hold big stakes, to all-time records would elicit praise from our corporate elites. But not so. They recognize that neither Biden nor Trump are pressing an agenda that would reset America’s direction and place us on an enduring path to prosperity. “I can’t design my presidential choice, and if I could, it wouldn’t be close to either of them,” remarks George. “I can’t believe I’m extolling Donald Trump!”
From my tiny survey, the leaders view both candidates as cowards who won’t tell America the truth about the dangers ahead. But the best they can do on Nov. 5 is pull the lever for the coward who will do the least harm.
