Jamie Dimon got taken to the woodshed in a scathing new column faulting the JPMorgan Chase CEO for normalizing Donald Trump.
The billionaire banker warned Democrats earlier this week at the World Economic Forum at Davos not to dismiss the former president's base as a cult of personality and said Trump was "right about some critical issues," and Bulwark columnists Dennis Aftergut and Walter H. White Jr. pounced on his remarks.
"The danger in Dimon’s remark lies as much in what he did not say as in what he did," the pair wrote. "Such a statement from such a powerful and influential business leader is just what a mad doctor ordered to normalize Trump."
The columnists pointed out that Trump had already attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss and promised to be a "dictator on Day One" if re-elected, and they said Dimon's praise for his policies on immigration was shortsighted, to say the least.
"You don’t need to be as smart as Jamie Dimon to recognize that Trump’s immigration initiatives are designed to create an enemy 'other,' just as the Third Reich did with Jews, gays, and Romani," Aftergut and White wrote. "The point is to spread an 'us-versus-them' mentality, promote xenophobia by instilling fear, and exploit it to produce allegiance to an all-powerful leader."
ALSO READ: Why Trump was the worst boss ever — according to 12 of his top White House officials
Dimon praised the quadruple-indicted ex-president's tax cuts, which were tilted heavily toward billionaires like himself, and said he was "kind of right about NATO," which he has threatened to leave, and the columnists called out the danger in those statements.
"Is Dimon teaching Trump what he can do?" they wrote. "Are we watching a powerful business influencer hedge his bets to protect his institution and his own pocketbook in the event of a possible Trump second term? For social leaders to adopt the narratives of an insurrection-inciter like Trump is a parlous step toward ending the rule of law and American constitutionalism."
"What will preserve our freedoms and our democracy is for each of us to tell influencers like Jamie Dimon to stop normalizing Trump by praising a would-be Caesar instead of burying him in truth," they added.
