According to a report from Time's Molly Ball, a Donald Trump speech right after the November election, where he claimed from the White House, "If you count the legal votes, I easily win," before adding "If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us," set off alarm bells for many of America's top CEO's who panicked at the idea that he was beginning a coup.
The report notes that the phone of influential Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld immediately began to ring as corporate titans flooded him with questions about what they were seeing and hearing.
With the report noting, "The speech was so dangerously dishonest that within a few minutes, all three broadcast television networks spontaneously stopped airing it," Ball adds that "By the time Tom Rogers, the founder of CNBC, got to Sonnenfeld, 'he had clearly gotten dozens of calls,' Rogers says. 'We were saying, 'This is real—Trump is trying to overturn the election.' Something had to happen fast.'"
So early on November 6th a conference call was arranged at 7AM that included 45 of America's top CEO's who tuned in to listen to Yale's Timothy Snyder, a historian of authoritarianism.
As Ball explained, "Snyder did not beat around the bush. What they were witnessing, he said, was the beginning of a coup attempt."
As Snyder recalls, "I went through it point by point, in a methodical way. Historically speaking, democracies are usually overthrown from the inside, and it is very common for an election to be the trigger for a head of state or government to declare some kind of emergency in which the normal rules do not apply. This is a pattern we know, and the name for this is a coup d'état."
He added, "If you are going to defeat a coup, you have to move right away. The timing and the clarity of response are very, very important."
According to the Time report, "A lively discussion ensued. Some of the more conservative executives, such as Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, wondered if the threat was being overstated, or echoed Trump's view that late ballots in Pennsylvania seemed suspicious. Yet others corrected them, pointing out that COVID-19 had led to a flood of mail-in ballots that by law could not be counted until the polls closed. By the end of the hour, the group had come to agreement that their normal political goals—lower taxes, less regulation—weren't worth much without a stable democracy underpinning them."
Ball reports most thought the meeting and ensuing public statement calling for "any disputes to be based on evidence and brought through the normal channels," was a one-time agreement but then they grew more concerned as Trump ramped up his rhetoric.
"Trump's effort to overturn the election persisted. So in the ensuing weeks, the professor called the executives together again and again, to address Trump's attempt to interfere with Georgia's vote count and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection," the report states with Snap-on CEO Nick Pinchuk recalling, "This was an event which violated those rituals of America and created a visceral reaction. Talking about this, it kind of transformed from the realm of politics to the realm of civic duty. CEOs wanted to speak out about this, and Jeff gave us a way to do that."
According to Snyder, the CEO's push-back, as well as pulling all support for Trump helped slow down the coup, with the authoritarian expert explaining, "If business leaders had just drifted along in that moment, or if a few had broken ranks, it might have gone very differently. They chose in that moment to see themselves as part of civil society, acting in the defense of democracy for its own sake."
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