Donald Trump is now irrelevant to corporate America. That is the unequivocal message coming from some C.E.O.s, and the Wall Street bankers who work most closely with them. The new strategy by corporate executives to get the policies they once hoped Trump would deliver to them—tax reform, the repatriation of corporate profits, regulatory relief, and a comprehensive infrastructure plan—is to forget about Trump altogether and to work directly with congressional leaders to craft bipartisan legislation that Trump will have no choice but to sign. These C.E.O.s and bankers say they are focussing their attention almost exclusively on working with Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who both have had their differences with Trump of late.
“The business community has been very aligned privately with leaders on the Republican caucus, both House and Senate,” a Wall Street executive who backed Hillary Clinton but supports certain parts of Trump’s agenda told me. “Everybody believes reform will happen or not happen irrespective of Donald Trump. That’s the big change. I believe we will have tax modification. I believe Trump will have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter whether he does or doesn’t. What I’m saying is Donald Trump as a leader of an agenda and a set of policies is no longer a part of the frame.”
Many cited Trump’s defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville as a breaking point in a steadily fraying relationship. That sense intensified with the Trump Administration’s announcement, this week, that it would end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama Administration policy that protected from deportation nearly a million undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. More than four hundred C.E.O.s and business leaders have signed a letter supporting DACA, including the leaders of A. T. & T., Hewlett-Packard, Hyatt Hotels, and Wells Fargo. The usually staunchly Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce criticized Trump’s DACA decision on both ethical and economic grounds.
“To reverse course now and deport these individuals is contrary to fundamental American principles and the best interests of our country,” Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s senior vice-president and chief policy officer, said in a statement. “With approximately 700,000 DACA recipients working for all sorts of businesses across the country, terminating their employment eligibility runs contrary to the president’s goal of growing the U.S. economy.”
For other C.E.O.s, the frustration with Trump came earlier. Some cited his dispiriting Inaugural Address as the beginning of the end; others identified Trump’s declaration that he was sending a naval “armada” to try to deter North Korea when it was actually thousands of miles away. “That just summed up where this [President] was going in terms of incompetence,” the Wall Street executive said, referring to what one of his Fortune 250 clients told him about Trump. And, the executive said, the Fortune 250 C.E.O. was a big Trump supporter during the election.
Corporate executives increasingly view Trump as so erratic, unpredictable, and polarizing that being too close to him risks alienating employees and consumers. They said the American workforce is, more than ever, a mosaic of creeds, ethnicities, and religions, and executives have no choice but to distance themselves from a President who insists on using the bully pulpit to drive a wedge between groups rather than unite them. “Charlottesville led to language [from C.E.O.s] that was not muted,” the Wall Street executive told me.
Dan Doctoroff, a former Wall Street executive who served as New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, told me that bipartisanship was now the key to legislative success. “We’re going to have to see the Republicans and Democrats in Congress actually begin to come together,” Doctoroff, a longtime Democratic donor, said. “The lesson of health care”—specifically, the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act—”at the end of the day, was, A, Trump was not going to be totally engaged in it, and, B, you can’t cram something down in an era of intense partisanship. It’s just too hard.”
Doctoroff, the author of “Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback,” which recounts his effort to revive New York City’s economy after 9/11, said that when he was deputy mayor he learned that former business executives “have to operate on two speeds at the same time” to be successful in public office. The first speed requires patience because there’s a process for everything in government. “There are constituencies that have to be touched and respected because they’re given a valid stake in the system,” he said. The second speed is marked by a sense urgency, discipline, and vision. “Everything is so complicated that it will die of its own weight unless you’re pushing it along aggressively with real discipline,” he continued. “That’s how we think we were able to get things done.”
According to Doctoroff, who is now the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet—the parent company of Google—that is reimagining the way cities work, Trump seems incapable of comprehending such nuance. “Trump has not mastered that art and is probably incapable of that art, and doesn’t realize that government is different than business,” he told me.
Tom Nides, a Democrat and the vice-chairman of Morgan Stanley who worked as the deputy secretary of state for management and resources under Hillary Clinton, predicted that “the elephant in the room” for corporate America would now be tax reform. “I don’t think anyone will be shy about working with the Congress trying to get tax reform done,” Nides said. “It’s going to be driven from the Congress. It’s not going to be driven from the White House.”
Another Wall Street executive, a longtime Republican donor who has known Trump for years and asked not to be named, told me he thinks a post-Charlottesville reality is starting to kick in among business leaders regarding what Trump can do for them. “The country saw him as the business President, and I think the businessmen saw him as the populist President,” he said. “There’s been a complete crossing of those two.”
The executive said businessmen were once “hoping” that Trump would deliver them less regulation, lower taxes, and the chance to repatriate corporate profits in an advantageous way. “I think they’re still hoping that his tendencies are towards that,” the executive explained. But business executives are now focussing their attention on Congress, just as they did during the Obama Presidency, which was seen as hostile by many Wall Street executives and corporate C.E.O.s. “I don’t see panic,” the executive, who continues to support Trump, said. “What I sense is, ‘O.K., we’re just going to go through the way we did it for the last ten years with Congress and hope that this guy signs the bill.’”
The second Wall Street executive told me that C.E.O.s who distance themselves from Trump will also pay a price. He said he worried that there will be “pushback” from Trump supporters against corporations such as Apple and JPMorganChase that made large donations—a million dollars and five hundred thousand dollars, respectively—to the Southern Poverty Law Center after Charlottesville “just to show that they agree with the condemnation of Trump.” The executive told me his advice to corporate C.E.O.s was to stay away from political landmines and focus on winning the political battles they care most about. “It’s very complicated,” the executive said. “I think that the best thing that corporates can do is stay out: just stay out of Charlottesville. Stay out. Go to your congressman, lobby for taxes, and stay out of this stuff. This stuff is dangerous.”
