Trump Doesn’t Have the Support of a Single Fortune 500 CEO, Top Business School Prof Claims On CNBC
Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld claimed Fortune 100 CEOs will be “reluctant [Joe] Biden voters” in November because they “truly fear” Donald Trump.
Sonnenfeld joined CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Monday to discuss a New York Times op-ed in which Sonnenfeld noted Trump’s lack of support among the CEOs he works with. Sonnenfeld is the senior associate dean for leadership at the Yale School of Management.
Sonnenfeld wrote in his op-ed:
I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.
The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.
Sonnenfeld told Sorkin on Monday that roughly 70% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Republican, but that does not mean they will be supporting the former president, arguing his response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally lost him any chance of public support from these business leaders.
“There are no Fortune 500 CEOs who are supporting former President Trump and that is a historic break going back to William Howard Taft and to Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan and the Bushes and everything, it’s been anywhere from 40-50% public and financial support,” Sonnenfeld said.
Sorkin pushed back, saying Trump’s support among business leaders does exist, noting Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman has backed Trump.
Sonnenfeld said Blackstone is “not even a Fortune 400 company” and joked that “there are more CEOs with their headquarters based in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the nation, than there are CEOs supporting Trump. Blackstone has been listed as a Fortune 500 company in the past, but in Sonnenfeld’s op-ed he refers to Fortune 100 companies, rather than top 500.
“They were never there for him in the beginning, they didn’t like his style, they hate the wedge issues and basically, Andrew, CEOs, as you know, are protectionists, they’re not isolationists, they’re not xenophobic, and Steve Schwarzman has said himself at out forums, ‘we believe investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers,’ and they take that very seriously,” he said, describing Schwarzman as a “friend.”
Sonnenfeld claimed Trump’s plan for increasing tariffs and cutting billions in taxes without commensurate spending cuts “frightens” CEOs, even if they are also not fans of the current president’s economic policies and the state of inflation. Sonnenfeld argued many CEOs will turn into “reluctant” Biden voters to prevent Trump from getting back into office.
“They will be reluctant Biden voters,” he said. “They don’t want the fabric of society pulled apart
Watch above via CNBC.
