When Jamie Dimon was asked back in November how many years he thought Donald Trump would last in office, he predicted a modest three and a half. But, he warned, “the Democrats have to come up with a reasonable candidate . . . or Trump will win again.” Two months later, with corporate tax cuts secured, the JPMorgan C.E.O. has changed his tune. “I wish I hadn’t said it,” he told Fox Business Network on Sunday, arguing that we could be looking at eight long years with the tweeter in chief.
“I was talking probabilistically,” Dimon continued, laying out the 2020 odds. “The thing about the Democrats is they will not have a chance, in my opinion. They don’t have a strong centrist, pro-business, pro-free enterprise [candidate].”
One could be forgiven for detecting in those criteria the seed of something self-serving. If the Democrats need a candidate who is closer to the middle than Bernie Sanders, who supports business, who regularly drops into Washington to weigh in on policy, who has previously ranted about Beltway bureaucracy, and who once uttered the words, “I’d love to be president”—with caveats, sure, but the words did leave his mouth—why not go straight to the source? Sure, Dimon completely dismissed the idea that he’s planning to run for office. But on the other hand, he seemingly can’t stop making comments that sound like a guy who might be convinced to throw his name into the ring.
Dimon, after all, has a penchant for generating political talking points. At a lunch hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago last fall, Dimon weighed in on a number of topics that would just so happen to make great campaign fodder. Of a certain real-estate developer-turned-president’s habit of trashing Mexico, Dimon said, “We should never be rude to a neighbor.” On race relations in the U.S., which Dimon said should be broached more frequently, he told the group, “If you’re white, paint yourself black and walk down the street one day, and you’ll probably have a little more empathy for how some of these folks get treated. We need to make a special effort because this is a special problem.” And then, of course, there was his August interview live from the South Side of Chicago, in which he said, among other things: “I’m a patriot before I’m the C.E.O. of JPMorgan”; “We have to make society better for people”; and “America is the best country on the planet. I’m a complete patriot. There’s nothing like this country. It is the shining city on a hill. But we should acknowledge our problems and fix them.”
But if Dimon says he’s not interested, he’s not interested. Democrats will just have to find a centrist, pro-business, pro-America, self-described patriot elsewhere.
