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Bit by bit, one by one, they started to come out.
After days of market mayhem, America’s billionaires finally did something this week that few top bosses have done since Donald Trump took office in January: sound off about the US president’s actions.
Trump’s sweeping tariffs, they said, were a “huge policy mistake” born of “stupidity” that could spark an “economic nuclear winter” and in some cases amounted to “bullshit”.
Talk about a gear shift. Until this market-melting moment, companies across the US had shown striking levels of deference to Trump’s agenda.
It is hard to say if this will change after his tariff backdown, but what is clear is just how hard it is to deal with an administration bent on upending normal rules of business engagement.
To start with, there is simple confusion.
Last week I spoke to Nneka Chiazor, head of the Public Affairs Council in Washington, a non-partisan association of public affairs professionals from some of the largest US companies.
She had just come back from meeting some of her members in Brussels, who peppered her with questions such as: “Can we still say ‘green’?”; “Is ‘clean’ still OK?”; “Would it be OK if we participated in [New York] Climate Week?”
“People are struggling with how to show respect for the US administration” while honouring their commitments to customers and other stakeholders, she said.
That struggle is harder when you see how fraught it can be for companies to do a U-turn on measures they once championed that do not chime with the Trump administration.
“Everyone looks completely hypocritical and directionless”, said New York University professor Alison Taylor, author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. “That has the impact of making anything that they say look completely implausible, which I don’t think is super smart.”
Then there is financial risk.
The number of shoppers visiting Target stores has fallen for nine weeks in a row since the retailer triggered a customer boycott with a January statement indicating it was pulling back from diversity initiatives it had long promoted, data from the Placer.ai analytics firm shows.
In contrast, footfall has kept growing at Costco, which fought a shareholder proposal aimed at undermining its diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Correlation is of course not causation. Many other factors could explain the difference.
Target’s trust and likeability score — a chief measure of reputation — did drop to a four-year low in the first quarter of this year, reckons market intelligence firm Caliber. But the Caliber surveys this is based on show it continues a downward trend that began years before Target’s diversity retreat.
Also, Caliber research on 10 big US companies including Target, Walmart and Apple indicates most had little or no change in their trust scores from the last quarter of 2024, regardless of whether they dropped or defended diversity measures.
But employee trust is another matter.
Consider the hundreds of associates from some of the world’s largest law firms that have signed an open letter condemning the administration’s targeting of firms it opposes.
Imagine how they felt when some of their firms then caved in, pledging millions of dollars in pro bono services to administration-approved causes — a move that seems to have surprised even the president.
Firms are saying, “Where do I sign? Where do I sign?” Trump marvelled at the White House last month. “Nobody can believe it.”
Perhaps. History suggests companies are rarely at the vanguard of political resistance, no matter how high the stakes get.
Dutch journalist David de Jong says that, in the years of research he did for his 2022 book Nazi Billionaires, he came across just two examples of major industrialists or companies defying Nazi Germany. Robert Bosch, founder of the eponymous engineering and technology group, and steel tycoon Fritz Thyssen.
Charles Hecker’s 2024 book Zero Sum offers another lesson about the foreign companies that kept doing business in an increasingly authoritarian Russia.
In one telling example, a senior European executive reveals these firms’ corporate headquarters were “wagging their fingers” about Moscow’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea, while urging their Russian offices to boost sales next year.
The US of 2025 is no Russia of 2014, let alone 1930s Germany.
All the same, any US company that bends to an administration uncommonly determined to bring its adversaries to heel is following a familiar path.
pilita.clark@ft.com
