Why is corporate America distancing itself from Trump ahead of election

Executives are more worried about democracy than their tax bills or the president's tweets

To put it in terms a Twitter-happy US president would understand, it has been more subtweet than tweetstorm. 

In recent days, leading US industry associations, chief executives, investors and business school professors have issued oblique rebukes of Donald Trump’s suggestions that he may not abide by the results of next week’s election if he does not like them. Most have been carefully worded but, as with any artfully indirect social media post, their meaning has been unmistakable. 

Most notably, several of the US’s biggest industry groups joined forces on Tuesday on a statement as striking as it was anodyne.

“We urge all Americans to support the process set out in our federal and state laws,” they wrote. That such traditionally cautious groups felt the need to say this speaks volumes. As anyone who has ever haggled over the phrasing of a statement with so many authors will tell you, its lowest-common-denominator wording was also as close as the business community will come to sending a shot across the president’s bows.

Faith-based investors had urged business A-listers who were keeping quiet to champion a peaceful transfer of power or risk being seen as “complicit in the chaos”. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon is one of the few to do so, though Expensify’s CEO went as far as to implore the 10m users of its expenses software to vote for Joe Biden because “not many expense reports get filed during a civil war.” 

Whether hesitant or hyperbolic, these statements all carry the same message: there is a growing consensus in corporate America that Trump is no longer good for business. That represents a sharp change since the start of the president’s term, but also an understandable consequence of what has happened since. 

Back in 2017, “business leaders held their nose and engaged in dialogue with this president because they saw some immediate financial opportunities and decided to look past what some wanted to believe were just stylistic peculiarities”, recalls Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR, a group which helps multinationals navigate their social responsibilities. 

Those opportunities were quickly realised, in the form of deregulation and a historic cut to corporate tax rates. But even early on they also came with sharp disagreements over tariffs, immigration, racist violence and environmental policy. Once tax cuts were in the bag, “the business relationship went from the good, the bad and the ugly, to just the bad and the ugly”, remarks Bennett Freeman, an adviser to companies on labour and human rights issues.