Trump-courting CEOs have ‘twisting stomachs’ as Dems eye their messages: analysis

Wealthy CEOs who kowtowed to President Donald Trump woke up Friday morning with “twisting stomachs” as they face a dramatic and potentially imminent reckoning for their conduct, according to Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff.

“Those CEOs have no idea what’s about to hit them,” Taylor warned in an analysis published Friday on his Substack.

Taylor, who said he advised top tech, AI, defense and biotech companies on navigating Washington after leaving government, argued that many executives who once condemned Trump spent the past two years showering him with cash and gifts, all while their companies sought billions in federal contracts, tariff exemptions and regulatory sign-offs on blockbuster mergers.

“There’s a name for this: corruption. And as the investigations roll forward, I believe you’ll see evidence of a more damning word: bribery,” Taylor wrote.

“The conventional wisdom is that corporate America showed a lack of courage. In my view, that’s far too kind. What I expect you’ll learn over the next two years is that some of these executives (not all, but some) engaged in something closer to criminal capitulation.”

One likely line of inquiry, Taylor argued, is Trump’s White House ballroom. In June, the watchdog group Public Citizen found that more than half of the publicly identified corporate ballroom donors had won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion in the six months after demolition of the East Wing began.

Other potential examples include companies like Disney, Meta and Paramount paying Trump millions of dollars to settle lawsuits that some legal experts argued the companies would have easily won.

“You’re starting to see why the billionaires are panicking,” Taylor wrote. “For every one of these acts, there’s a paper trail somewhere. Each major company has a D.C. office, and each of those offices spent late 2024 and all of 2025 trading emails, texts, and Slack messages about how to position their company with the incoming president.”