What a Second Term for Trump Would Mean for Business,in His Own Words
This article is from: Bloomberg Businessweek (North America), Thursday, August 1, 2024
It’s late June, and Donald Trump is plotting his next presidency in the gilded
offseason isolation of the Mar-a-Lago Club. The adoring club members may have
decamped to cooler climates, but Trump is still in a good mood.
Polls show a very tight race between him and President Joe Biden, but his fundraising
is through the roof. It’s also now clear his 34 felony convictions haven’t upended the
race. A big shock will come two days later, at the first presidential debate, and it will
be Biden who’s left reeling. Then a bigger one will arrive on July 13, when Trump
narrowly dodges an assassin’s bullet.
The Mar-a-Lago sitting room features a soaring red balloon tower dotted with giant
gold ones reading “47,” shorthand for the next president—a gift from a local
admirer who affixed a card gushing over “the best commander in chief America has
ever known.” At Trump’s insistence, a staffer fetches the hot new fashion item he
enjoys showing guests: a red MAGA-style cap emblazoned with “Trump Was Right
About Everything.”
Outside Mar-a-Lago’s gates, the rest of the world isn’t so sure. There’s worry about
what another Trump presidency could portend. Wall Street firms from Goldman
Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Barclays have begun warning clients to expect higher
inflation as Trump’s odds of recapturing the White House and imposing protectionist
trade policies have risen. Giants of the American economy such as Apple, Nvidia and
Qualcomm are grappling with how further confrontation with China could affect
them and the chips everyone relies on. Democracies across Europe and Asia worry
about Trump’s isolationist impulses, his shaky commitment to Western alliances and
his relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir
Putin. And while polls universally show that American voters favor Trump’s
stewardship of the economy over Biden’s, it’s unclear to many exactly what they’ll
get if they opt for another round with him.
He waves away such concerns. “Trumponomics,” he says, equates to “low interest
rates and taxes.” It’s “tremendous incentive to get things done and to bring business
back to our country.” Trump would drill more and regulate less. He’d shut the
Southern border. He’d squeeze enemies and allies alike for better trade terms. He’d
unleash the crypto industry and rein in reckless Big Tech companies. In short, he’d
make the economy great again.
That’s the sales pitch, anyway. The plain truth is that no one really knows what to
expect. So Bloomberg Businessweek went to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, to
press Trump for answers.
In a wide-ranging interview on business and the global economy, he says that, if he
wins, he’ll allow Jerome Powell to serve out his term as chair of the Federal Reserve,
which runs through May 2026. Trump wants to bring the corporate tax rate to as low
as 15%, and he no longer plans to ban TikTok. He’d consider Jamie Dimon, chairman
and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., to serve as secretary of the
Department of the Treasury.
Trump is cool to the idea of protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression and to US
efforts to punish Putin for invading Ukraine. “I don’t love sanctions,” he says. He
keeps circling back to William McKinley, who he says raised enough revenue through
tariffs during his turn-of-the-20th-century presidency to avoid instituting a federal
income tax yet never got the appropriate credit.
And Trump (who has a proclivity to lie) insists he won’t pardon himself if convicted
(of a federal crime in the three federal cases pending against him: “I wouldn’t
consider it.” He may not have to—on July 15, a Trump-appointed federal judge
dismissed charges that he mishandled classified documents. (The special counsel
swiftly announced he would appeal the decision.)
The broad strokes of Trumponomics might not be different from what they were
during his first term. What’s new is the speed and efficiency with which he intends to
enact them. He believes he understands the levers of power much more deeply now,
including the importance of selecting the right people for the right jobs. “We had
great people, but I had some people that I would not have chosen for a second time,”
he says. “Now, I know everybody. Now, I am truly experienced.”
Trump views his economic message as his best route to trouncing the Democrats in
November, with Republicans devoting the opening night of their presidential
convention to the theme of “wealth.” He’s betting that his unorthodox agenda of tax
cuts, more oil, less regulation, higher tariffs and fewer foreign financial
commitments will appeal to enough swing state voters to hand him the election. It’s
also a gamble that voters will overlook the negative traits that characterized his first
term in the White House: the personnel fights, the 180-degree policy shifts, the 6
a.m. social media pronouncements. And of course there’s the matter of the attempted
insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Already, polling shows signs that Black and Hispanic men are shifting to the
Republican Party as they tire of historically high prices for food, housing and gas. As
many as 20% of Black men now back Trump, though some pundits think those
numbers are overstated. Either way, Biden is struggling to sell key voters on his
economic record, which includes a very low unemployment rate and rising wages.
He’s also facing down panic over his age. Trump could win in November, and many
Democratic leaders are increasingly concerned he’ll deliver Republicans control of
the House and Senate along with the White House.
In that case, he’d have unprecedented leverage to shape the US economy, the climate
for global businesses and trade with allies. His first term demonstrated that he
prefers to work oneon-one, which would give the CEOs and world leaders who have
the best relationships with him an advantage while leaving his enemies falling short,
and perhaps even fearful of what he’ll do. If one thing stands out from
Businessweek’s interview with Trump, it’s that he’s fully aware of this power—and
he has every intention of using it.
On the US Economy
Trump, in a dark suit and tie, holds court in the cool afternoon darkness of Mar-a-
Lago’s chintz-and-gold sitting room, keen as always to play the magnanimous host.
He takes it upon himself to order a round of Cokes and Diet Cokes for his visitors,
then gets down to explaining how he’d govern if reelected in November.
“Now, I know everybody. Now, I am truly experienced”
(Business leaders prize stability and certainty. They didn’t get much of either in
Trump’s first presidency. This time around, his campaign is more professionally run,
but he hasn’t produced a detailed economic policy agenda to reassure them. The
vacuum has generated confusion among those who are planning for a second Trump
term.
In late April, a few of Trump’s informal policy advisers leaked to the Wall Street
Journal an explosive draft proposal to severely curb the independence of the Federal
Reserve. It was broadly inferred that Trump had endorsed the idea, which didn’t
seem like a stretch given his prior attacks on Powell. In fact, the Trump campaign
insisted he’d endorsed neither the proposal nor the leak, and his top campaign brass
were furious about it. But the episode was a consequence of Trump’s still-unformed
policy, which has left wonks from such think tanks as the Heritage Foundation
battling to fill in the details and jockey for influence. Other conservative policy
entrepreneurs have been pushing proposals to devalue the dollar or institute a flat
tax.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump makes it clear he’s fed up with the unauthorized freelancing.
“There’s a lot of false information,” he complains. He’s eager to set the record
straight on several topics.
First, there’s Powell. He told Fox News in February that he wouldn’t reappoint the
Fed chair; now he states unequivocally that he’ll let Powell finish his term, which
would last well into a second Trump administration.
“I would let him serve it out,” Trump says, “especially if I thought he was doing the
right thing.”
Even so, Trump has thoughts on interest-rate policy, at least in the near term. The
Fed, he warns, should abstain from cutting rates before the November election and
giving the economy, and Biden, a boost. Wall Street fully expects two interest-rate
cuts before the end of the year, including one, crucially, before the election. “It’s
something that they know they shouldn’t be doing,” he says.
Next on his mind: inflation. Trump has been endlessly critical of Biden’s stewardship
of the economy. But he sees, in the anger generated by high prices and interest rates,
an opportunity to woo voters who typically don’t support Republicans, such as Black
and Hispanic men. Trump says he’ll bring down prices by opening up the US to more
oil and gas drilling. “We have more liquid gold than anybody,” he says.
Third is immigration. He believes harsh restrictions are key to boosting domestic
wages and employment. He characterizes immigration restrictions as “the biggest
[factor] of all” in how he’d reshape the economy, with particular benefits for the
minorities he’s eager to win over. “The Black people are going to be decimated by the
millions of people that are coming into the country,” he says. “They’re already
feeling it. Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the
migrants coming in illegally into the country.” (According to the US Bureau of Labor
(Statistics, the majority of employment gains since 2018 have been for naturalized US
citizens and legal residents—not migrants.)
Trump’s language turns apocalyptic. “The Black population in this country is going
to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs—their jobs,
their housing, everything,” he continues. “I want to stop that.”
Drilling for oil aside, Trump hasn’t detailed a plan for lowering prices. His personal
conviction that the robust tariffs he’s proposing will produce a US windfall isn’t
shared by mainstream economists, who warn that they’ll spur further inflation and
amount to a tax increase for US households. A report from the Peterson Institute for
International Economics estimates that his tariff regime would impose an additional
annual cost of $1,700 for the average middle-income family. And Oxford Economics,
a nonpartisan research group, estimates that Trump’s combination of tariffs,
immigration restrictions and extended tax cuts could also increase inflation and slow
economic growth. The through line of these policies, says Bernard Yaros, lead US
economist at Oxford Economics, is “an increase in inflation expectations.”
Then there’s the budget deficit. Trump’s desire to renew his landmark 2017 Tax Cuts
and Jobs Act—estimated price tag: $4.6 trillion—and to further reduce corporate
taxes doesn’t pencil out to a balanced budget in any way that he or his advisers have
yet explained. Coupled with the upward pressure on interest rates economists expect
from his protectionist policies, Trump’s plans could exacerbate the country’s
growing debt burden.
In the end, however, Trump’s other positions could be enough to sway business
leaders to his side. Harold Hamm, a Trump donor and the executive chairman of oil
giant Continental Resources Inc., writes in an email: “There seems to be outright
hostility to free markets in the Biden Administration. As a result, capital is parked on
the sidelines. Why? Because of regulatory uncertainty and in some cases downright
regulatory hostility toward certain sectors.” Hamm cites the pause Biden put on
liquefied natural gas projects in January as one example. “When Trump is reelected,”
he predicts, “that capital that was parked on the sidelines will be unleashed
once again.”
On US Business Leaders
Corporate America is still adjusting to the likelihood of Trump’s return. Privately,
many CEOs aren’t thrilled. “They can’t stand him,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale
School of Management professor who runs a leadership institute for CEOs and speaks
regularly with many top executives. Nevertheless, they recognize that a shotgun
remarriage could be in the offing.
On June 13, Trump met privately in Washington with
dozens of the country’s most prominent chief executives, a group that included
JPMorgan’s Dimon, Tim Cook of Apple and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America. The
occasion was a “fireside chat” put on by the Business Roundtable, a nonpartisan
(lobbying group. The gathering brought Trump face-to-face with a number of
corporate leaders with whom he’s long had a vexed relationship. Many were leery of
him from the outset of his presidency; some spoke out publicly after the Jan. 6
attacks on the US Capitol by his supporters. Cook, Dimon and Moynihan all
condemned the violence, with Cook calling it “a sad and shameful chapter in our
nation’s history.” Yet just weeks after a Manhattan jury convicted Trump of 34
felonies, everyone dutifully assembled to commune with him—an unmistakable sign
of the shifting power dynamic.
Trump is highly attuned to his standing with America’s corporate chieftains, and he
vacillates between wanting their approval and hoping to bend them to his will. At
Mar-a-Lago, when he’s presented with the July issue of Businessweek, featuring
LVMH Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy SE CEO Bernard Arnault on the cover, he refers
to Arnault, one of the world’s richest men, as “an incredible guy, a friend of mine I
think,” and asks whether this relationship had come up. (It hadn’t.)
Trump bristles when it’s pointed out to him that no Fortune 100 CEO has publicly
contributed to his campaign. (Since then, Elon Musk has pledged financial support.)
And he’s still smarting from CNBC’s coverage of the Business Roundtable meeting,
which featured quotes from an anonymous CEO who slammed Trump as “remarkably
meandering” and “all over the map.”
On the contrary, the meeting was “a lovefest,” Trump insists. “I will tell you when
I’m not loved, because I feel that better than anybody,” he says. “CNBC called and
apologized to me, because they found that we had a great meeting.” (A CNBC
spokesperson writes: “We did not apologize. We spoke to the former president about
keeping the lines of communication open.”)
Trump says he reminded the assembled executives that in 2017 he slashed the
corporate tax rate “from 39% to 21%” (actually from 35% to 21%) and vowed to push
it lower still, to 20%. “They loved it, they were happy,” he recalls. He adds that he
wants to cut the rate even lower than that: “I would like to get it down to 15.”
But Trump is also aware that whatever “love” the CEOs might have expressed was
ultimately driven by self-interest: They can read election polls like everyone else.
“Whoever’s leading gets all the support they want,” he says. “I could have the
personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come.”
This wasn’t always the case. With Trump disgraced and seemingly finished in politics
after his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the Republican business
community was part of a coalition eager to anoint a new standard-bearer for the
party. It began lavishing money and attention on a rising generation of businessfriendly
politicians, led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina
Governor Nikki Haley and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has also served as
co-CEO of the investment firm Carlyle Group Inc. But in 2024, DeSantis’ presidential
campaign collapsed, Haley’s petered out, and Youngkin’s never took place. Business
(leaders were shocked and crestfallen as Trump cruised to the nomination.
“Everyone read this wrong,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican business lobbyist.
“There was a core assumption that Trump was finished. But DeSantis was never
going to be the guy, nor was Haley. People saw an opportunity to turn the page, tried
to make it happen, and it didn’t happen. The base wanted Trump.”
Trump famously carries grudges: At a conservative political conference last year, he
pledged to deliver “retribution.” But asked at Mar-a-Lago whether he’ll go after
CEOs he dislikes, he demurs. “I don’t have [plans for] retribution against anyone,” he
says.
He does rekindle long-running feuds with Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg
and Amazon.com Inc. founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos, whose
newspaper kept a running tally of false claims Trump made while president (it
reached 30,573), draws particular ire. Trump says he has “done a great disservice to
himself” and made “a lot of enemies” with his ownership of the Post.
For all his corporate critics and enemies, Trump doesn’t lack support in the
boardroom or on Wall Street. “The Trump economy was very good,” says Scott
Bessent, CEO of Key Square Capital Management LLC and a top Trump donor. “It
worked for people at the top and at the bottom. The market was good. Real wages
increased. It was a very good time.”
Other prominent CEOs who don’t identify as Trump partisans have also been praising
his presidency. “Be honest,” Dimon said at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, in January. “He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about
immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right
about some of China. … He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues, and
that’s why they’re voting for him.”
Trump relishes the compliment. He’s changed his view of the man he attacked on
Truth Social last year as “Highly overrated Globalist Jamie Dimon” and now says he
could envision Dimon, who’s thought to be contemplating a political career, as his
secretary of the Treasury. “He is somebody that I would consider,” Trump says. (A
spokesperson for Dimon declined to comment.)
For all his periodic wrath toward business leaders, Trump appears eager to have them
serve in a second administration. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a former
tech CEO, made Trump’s short list for vice president and is likely to land in his
cabinet. Bessent is also a candidate for Treasury secretary. Trump is even embracing
CEOs who, not long ago, were considered possible challengers. “Glenn Youngkin is
prime time,” he says in a post-interview aside. “I’d love to have him in my
administration.” And Trump’s ultimate pick as running mate, JD Vance, was a
venture capitalist for years.
Still, many chief executives feel trepidation about a Trump renaissance. Ken
Chenault, the former chairman and CEO of American Express Co., says Trump’s
(threats have had a chilling effect on corporate leaders. “People are staying on the
sidelines,” he says, “because they greatly fear that there will be retribution.”
Chenault raises another example of that happening during Trump’s presidency: his
opposition to the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger and concerns he was trying
to force a sale of CNN over displeasure with its coverage of his administration.
Current CEOs, Chenault says, are terrified of winding up in Trump’s crosshairs: “The
fear is real.”
On Foreign Policy
As president, Trump shattered the long-standing Republican orthodoxy of favoring
free trade. He says he’ll go further if reelected. At Mar-a-Lago he offers an
impassioned defense of US tariffs—he’s been studying McKinley, dubbing him “the
Tariff King”—to make it clear he intends to ratchet up levies not just on China but on
the European Union, too.
“McKinley made this country rich,” Trump says. “He was the most underrated
president.” In Trump’s reading of history, McKinley’s successors squandered his
legacy on costly government programs such as the New Deal (“the whole thing with
the parks and the dams”) and unjustly poisoned an important tool for economic
statecraft. “I can’t believe how many people are negative on tariffs that are actually
smart,” Trump says. “Man, is it good for negotiation. I’ve had guys, I’ve had
countries that were potentially extremely hostile coming to me and saying, ‘Sir,
please stop with the tariff stuff.’”
To the consternation of many business and consumer groups, Biden maintained
Trump’s tariffs on China, even increasing ones on steel, aluminum, semiconductors,
electric vehicles, batteries and other goods. “This is going to add price inflation
across the board, all in the name of ‘tough guy’ election-year politics,” Yaël
Ossowski, deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center, a nonpartisan advocacy
group, said in May.
In Trumpworld, however, Biden’s actions are seen as validation that Trump was right
—and his Democratic critics were wrong—about the threat China poses to the US
economy and security. Trump is eager to prescribe more of the same medicine,
including to European allies. In addition to targeting China for new tariffs of
anywhere from 60% to 100%, he says he’d impose a 10% across-the-board tariff on
imports from other countries, citing a familiar litany of complaints about foreign
countries not buying enough US goods.
“The ‘European Union’ sounds so lovely,” Trump says. “We love Scotland and
Germany. We love all these places. But once you get past that, they treat us violently.”
He mentions reluctance in Europe to import US automobiles and agricultural
products as key drivers of the more than $200 billion trade deficit, a statistic he
considers a critical measure of economic fairness.
As with so much else, Trump views trade in personal terms. He speaks of it as though
(it were a private negotiation between himself and recalcitrant foreign leaders who
understand full well that they’re exploiting the US and therefore must be curbed.
He’s animated as he recounts a conversation with Angela Merkel, then Germany’s
chancellor. “Angela, how many Fords or how many Chevrolets are there in the middle
of Munich right now?” he remembers asking.
He mimics Merkel’s German accent in reply: “Oh, I do not believe many.”
“How about none?” he says he shot back.
Satisfied that he’s illustrated his point, Trump turns back to the Businessweek
reporters. “They treat us very badly,” he says. “But I was changing all of that and
that culture.” Return him to the White House, he suggests, and he’ll finish the job.
Trump’s transactional view of foreign policy and his desire
to “win” every deal could have ramifications around the globe—and even rupture US
alliances. Asked about America’s commitment to defending Taiwan from China,
which views the Asian democracy as a breakaway province, Trump makes it clear
that, despite recent bipartisan support for Taiwan, he’s at best lukewarm about
standing up to Chinese aggression. Part of his skepticism is grounded in economic
resentment. “Taiwan took our chip business from us,” he says. “I mean, how stupid
are we? They took all of our chip business. They’re immensely wealthy.” What he
wants is for Taiwan to pay the US for protection. “I don’t think we’re any different
from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?” he asks.
Another factor driving his skepticism is what he regards as the practical difficulty of
defending a small island on the other side of the globe. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles
away,” he says. “It’s 68 miles away from China.” Abandoning the commitment to
Taiwan would represent a dramatic shift in US foreign policy— as significant as
halting support for Ukraine. But Trump sounds ready to radically alter the terms of
these relationships.
His views about Saudi Arabia, by contrast, are more amicable. He says he’s spoken to
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud within the past six months, though he
declines to elaborate on the nature and frequency of their talks. Asked if he worries
that increasing US oil and gas production would upset the Saudis, who wish to
maintain their primacy in energy, Trump replies that he doesn’t think so, pointing
once more to a personal relationship. “He likes me, I like him,” he says of the crown
prince. “They’re always going to need protection … they’re not naturally protected.”
He adds: “I’ll always protect them.”
Trump blames Biden and former President Barack Obama for eroding US relations
with Saudi Arabia, saying they pushed the country toward a key adversary. “They’re
not with us anymore,” he says. “They’re with China. But they don’t want to be with
China. They want to be with us.”
He has reasons beyond American foreign policy for favoring closer ties with the
Saudis. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake for him. On July 1 the Trump
(Organization and DAR Global announced plans to build a Trump Tower and luxury
hotel in Jeddah. An investment fund founded by his son-in-law Jared Kushner has
also taken a $2 billion investment from the Saudi government’s wealth fund.
Western allies, now familiar with Trump’s personal and mercurial approach to
foreign policy, are taking extensive measures to prepare for his possible return to the
White House. These include increasing defense spending, transferring control of
military aid for Ukraine to NATO, racing to improve relationships with Trump’s
advisers and affiliated think tanks, and reaching out to Republican governors and
thought leaders to divine his intentions. At a NATO summit in Washington, Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged allies to act quickly to help his country repel
Russia’s invasion instead of waiting for the election results in November to decide
what to do.
Dan Caldwell, a policy adviser at the right-leaning think tank Defense Priorities, says
that “it’s actually in Europe’s interest to ‘America-proof’ their defense and to start
operating on the assumption that the United States has other, more urgent national
security priorities, and domestic ones as well.”
On Silicon Valley
During his presidency and afterward, Trump frequently took aim at the US tech
industry. For much of that time, Twitter (now X) was his platform of choice for
venting displeasure with companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter itself,
preElon Musk. In 2020 he signed an executive order reducing legal protections for
social media platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of
1996. And his government launched antitrust probes into Amazon, Apple, Facebook
and Google—actions carried on and expanded under Biden.
Trump’s attacks on Big Tech have never been ironclad statements of policy or
principle, exactly. Not unlike his tariff proposals, they’ve served at least as much as
leverage plays—his staking out negotiating positions that companies and CEOs must
respond to. The central complaint he and Republicans used to make was that tech
companies were biased against conservatives—shadowbanning them, deplatforming
them and (allegedly) suppressing right-leaning sources in search results. Today,
Trump’s focus is on a more broadly appealing charge: that out-of-control tech
companies are harming children—to the point, even, of causing a nationwide
epidemic of suicides. “They have become too big, too powerful,” he argues. “They’re
having a huge negative impact on, especially, young people.”
This position may stem from Trump’s understanding of how televised drama can
shape public opinion. In February, during a Senate hearing of tech executives,
Zuckerberg was effectively bullied into apologizing to families in the audience who
said social media abuse had driven their children to suicide. It was an arresting
moment, and Trump has harnessed the charge for his campaign. “I don’t want them
destroying our youth,” he says of the social media companies. “You see what they’re
(doing— including, even, suicides.”
Moments later, however, he’s defending many of these same platforms as vital
bulwarks against Chinese technological supremacy. Trump wants to personally
dominate the US companies, but he doesn’t want foreign competitors replacing
them. “I respect them greatly,” he insists of the companies he was just bashing. “If
you go after them very violently, you can destroy them. I don’t want to destroy
them.”
At Mar-a-Lago, the one exception to his claim to not want to harm US tech
companies, and to privilege domestic ones over foreign ones, is TikTok. Discussing
his recent embrace of the Chinese-owned social media platform, where he’s already
quite popular, Trump mentions that banning it in the US would benefit a company
and a CEO he has no desire to reward. “Now [that] I’m thinking about it, I’m for
TikTok, because you need competition,” he says. “If you don’t have TikTok, you have
Facebook and Instagram—and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.” It’s an outcome
he won’t abide. He’s still stung by Facebook’s decision to bar him indefinitely in the
wake of the Jan. 6 attacks. “All of a sudden,” Trump grouses, “I went from No. 1 to
having nobody.”
His reversal on cryptocurrency has been marked by similar
“Taiwan took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we?”
dynamics. Not long ago he criticized Bitcoin as a “scam” and a “disaster waiting to
happen.” Now he says it and other cryptocurrencies should be “made in the USA.” He
frames this aboutface as a practical necessity. “If we don’t do it, China is going to
figure it out, and China’s going to have it—or somebody else,” he says.
Not coincidentally, the crypto industry—spurned by the Democratic Party, brimming
with cash and eager for friends in Washington—has now found its way to Trump.
“Thanks largely to the actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Biden
administration has stumbled into becoming anti-crypto,” says Justin Slaughter,
policy director at the crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm. “Given that about
20% of Democrats own crypto, per polling, and its ownership skews young and
nonWhite, this was politically unwise.” Trump has moved to fill the void, declaring in
a May speech that he would “stop Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto.” The following
month he reaped the benefits, raising money from Bitcoin miners at a Mar-a-Lago
fundraiser. Trump’s campaign then announced it would “build a crypto army,” and it
now accepts crypto contributions.
Some in Silicon Valley have learned that the best way to get Trump to alter his
position on something is to appeal to him directly. That was certainly the case for
Tim Cook. In 2019, Apple Inc. looked set to be a victim of Trump’s trade war with
China, with billions of dollars at stake, as the president announced 25% import
tariffs. He then publicly rejected Apple’s request for an exclusion. “Apple will not be
given Tariff waiver, or relief, for Mac Pro parts that are made in China,” he wrote on
(Twitter. “Make them in the USA, no Tariffs!”
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump speaks fondly of Cook and reveals how Apple’s CEO
persuaded him to relent. He recalls Cook reaching out privately and asking, “Could I
come in and see you?” Trump appreciated the gesture of respect from the head of
what at the time was the world’s most valuable company. “That’s impressive,”
Trump says. “I said, ‘Yeah, come in.’” Trump remembers that Cook was
straightforward. “He said to me, ‘I need help, you have tariffs of 25% and 50% [on
Apple products imported from China],’” he recalls. “He said, ‘It would really hurt our
business. It would destroy our business, potentially.’” (An Apple spokesperson
declined to comment.)
Trump wasn’t looking to do that—mainly, he wanted to demonstrate that he could
bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, as he’d promised to do. In his telling, he
prevailed upon Cook to expand domestic production. “I said, ‘I’m gonna do
something for you guys,’” Trump recalls, “‘but you have to build in this country.’”
Four months later, Apple announced it was beginning construction on a campus in
Austin. The press release quoted Cook saying: “Building the Mac Pro, Apple’s most
powerful device ever, in Austin is both a point of pride and a testament to the
enduring power of American ingenuity.” Cook then gifted Trump a $5,999 Mac Pro,
one of the first made at the Texas factory.
Had Trump forced Cook’s hand? Doubtful. Apple had originally announced a year
earlier that it would invest $1 billion in a new Austin campus, and Mac Pros had been
assembled at existing Texas facilities since the Obama era. Nevertheless, the episode
registered as a positive for Trump and established Cook at the opposite end of his
personal CEO continuum from Zuckerberg. It also created a potential road map for
how tech CEOs might navigate a second Trump term.
“I found him to be a very good businessman,” he says of Cook.
On the Uncertain Future
What Trump thinks about American businesses and the people who run them
suddenly matters more than ever. So do his views on the Fed, the economy and every
important issue around the globe. The shock of Biden’s faltering debate performance
on June 27 supercharged doubts about the president’s cognitive health and plunged
the Democratic Party into an existential crisis. It also gave Trump a measurable lead
in many polls—and, along with narrowly surviving the assassination attempt, may
have amplified his already formidable sense of political inviolability.
“The debate certainly had a big impact,” he says in a July 9 follow-up call, four days
before the shooting. “A lot of the states are just starting now to come out, and it
shows a very big swing.” Asked whether Biden should drop out of the race, he says,
“That’s a decision he has to make. But I do think our country is in great danger
whether he stays in or drops out.” On Vice President Kamala Harris, considered a
likely alternative at the top of a Democratic ticket, Trump says, “I don’t think it
(would make much difference. I would define her in a very similar [way] that I define
him.” With months to go before Election Day, there’s plenty of time for the dynamics
of the race to change.
But even back at Mar-a-Lago, a couple of days before Biden’s debate stumble, Trump
seemed to be riding this heightened sense of good fortune. When the resort’s
longtime managing director dropped by during the conversation, Trump noted with
pride that the club would increase its initiation fee from $700,000 to $1 million in
October, with four new slots open—a sign, presumably, of the increased value of
proximity to potentially the next commander-in-chief.
And at the conclusion of our interview, Trump, boastful to the very end, tried to send
Businessweek off with that new MAGA hat (“Trump Was Right About Everything”).
We politely declined. That’s ultimately for the voters to decide.
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