The business community is purportedly wise to Trump and if there's a sequel they likely will "act when they see autocratic power abuses and assaults upon the national character."
Time columnist and Yale University professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld reflects back on his two decades of ties to the 45th president and how the thinking that C-suite executives are going to pay fealty to the former president isn't so.
"The hunches that CEOs are enthusiastic for Trump’s return are not based upon any stated first-hand endorsements from CEOs," he writes, adding that among the top corporation leaders that he's rubbed elbows with "they largely want nothing to do with him now."
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The reason is many of these powerful individuals don't square with his general paradigm, and so "there is no incentive for them to condemn him in the absence of any current abuse of power, but they did not hesitate to do so before and, I feel sure, will not hesitate to speak out again should he act up."
What's more, he claims Trump's burned many of them before.
"The stark lack of enthusiasm from CEOs for Trump is also because the business community has already learned its lesson..." according to Sonnenfeld.
That was most clear back in 2017 after the Charlottesville protest led by Far Right nationalists raising tiki torches in support of protecting a monument of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The event led to the untimely death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Trump opined then that there were “some very bad people” involved in pro-statue protests. “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."
For his time that he's known Trump, Sonnenfeld writes that the reception to many major business owners has been icy because "few saw him as a genuine peer — since he had not ever run a global public company."
And his moral compass was apparently too much way back in 2006.
The professor brought Trump to a CEO gathering at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and as he puts it, he might as well have been delivering rotten fish because "many of the biggest names on the guest list walked out in protest."
He believes that the business community leaders may not come forward to back or condemn him, but if he should return to power they will act should Trump "create another catastrophic moment which tears at the fabric of American society."
