Corporate America doesn't want to fight with President Trump in public. But as a result, it's ceding him an unprecedented amount of control over the shape — and future — of U.S. business.
In the past week, the president has turned up the heat on big companies and their CEOs to an extent that is unprecedented even by Trump's norms-shattering standards. He has publicly attacked companies and their executives throughout his political career — but now he's demanding firings of executives who aren't even household names, such as a corporate economist at Goldman Sachs.
On Monday, Trump announced an extraordinary deal for the U.S. government to take a 15% share of Nvidia's H20 chip sales in China as a condition for easing restrictions to allow the chip to be sold there. Then his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, on Wednesday said the administration may ask other companies for similar payments in the future.
"Trump has always used the bully pulpit of the presidency to try and direct business activity towards his desired ends — but in the second term, we've seen this taken to a whole new level," said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The Nvidia revenue-sharing arrangement, in particular, sounded alarms among the U.S. business community — which tends to skew fiscally conservative and anti-regulation, and which in general welcomed Trump's reelection last year. By demanding a cut of a private company's sales, in exchange for the right to do business, Trump is defying the traditionally Republican gospel of free-market capitalism.
On Monday, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal warned that Trump is "imitating [the] Chinese Communist Party" and transforming the U.S. economy into something resembling China's government-controlled "state capitalism."
It's a mounting worry shared by other business experts. "It is a huge concern," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who regularly speaks with CEOs.
"This 'Marxist MAGA' movement keeps expanding more and more, taking control without the resistance of private-sector decision-making," he added. "So that means we have winners and losers based on cronyism."
In an emailed response to NPR, White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not address the concerns about cronyism or "state capitalism."
"President Trump's hands-on leadership is paving the way towards a new Golden Age for America," Desai wrote.
Trump amps up his attacks on CEOs and other executives
Trump has long used social media and his other public statements to cajole, criticize and praise companies and individual CEOs. They, in turn, have actively sought his approval — especially since he won reelection in November.
During his first term, many in corporate America openly criticized Trump over policies including his ban on immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries, or they sought to distance themselves from his most controversial statements, like his response after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. But now most businesses are trying to avoid getting drawn into anything seen as "political" — aside from actively courting the president's approval.
In January, Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos were just some of the business leaders attending Trump's second inauguration. And until the two men fell out this spring, Trump granted Tesla CEO Elon Musk an extraordinary amount of power to dismantle the federal workforce.
Corporate America's uneasy silence has continued despite Trump's aggressive efforts to reshape the U.S. economy through his wide-ranging import taxes, and to bring the Federal Reserve more closely under his control.
Many of these policies have worried Wall Street investors, big-company CEOs and the small-business owners who are on the front lines of the tariffs fallout. But even as they try to lobby Trump behind closed doors, many business leaders are refraining from criticizing him or his policies in public.
"Because of the power of this vindictiveness, CEOs are reluctant to poke the bear," Sonnenfeld said.
Trump has warned major automakers not to raise prices and has publicly demanded that Walmart "eat" the cost of his tariffs. He also took credit for Coca-Cola's recent announcement that it would roll out sodas made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.
But last week, he went a step further by demanding the resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. In a social media post that sent the company's shares plunging, Trump alleged that Tan was "highly CONFLICTED" and had problematic ties to China.
From an economic perspective, Trump's demand for Tan's resignation was one of the "most aggressive public statements the president has made," said Meena Bose, a presidential policy expert and director of a Hofstra University center that studies the American presidency.
"So much of President Trump's second term is really charting an independent path, with very little attention to precedent — or in some ways, almost a rejection of precedent," she added.
Tan was able to change Trump's tune by appealing to him in person. After the Intel CEO visited the White House on Monday, Trump declared that Tan's "success and rise is an amazing story."
Intel's shares jumped. The company said in a news release that Tan used the meeting to discuss "Intel's commitment to strengthening U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership. We appreciate the President's strong leadership to advance these critical priorities." A spokesperson declined to comment further.
But soon Trump had picked another corporate target. On Tuesday, he criticized Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and told him to "get himself a new Economist." Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius has repeatedly warned that Trump's wide-ranging tariffs will ultimately increase the prices that U.S. consumers pay and could damage the wider economy.
A Goldman Sachs spokesperson declined to comment. And its investors were less spooked than Intel's; the bank's shares have risen since Trump's post.
Calling for CEOs to take "collective action"
Corporate America is hardly alone in feeling increased heat from the White House. Since taking office in January, Trump has won all kinds of concessions from law firms, universities and media companies seeking U.S. approval for mergers or other business dealings.
Meanwhile, the president is also seeking to undermine the independence of other powerful U.S. entities, including the Federal Reserve. His ongoing campaign against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over lowering interest rates preceded his decision this month to fire the head of the government's top statistics agency after it put out a disappointing jobs report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is responsible for producing the monthly jobs report and for tracking inflation.
That firing set off bipartisan alarm bells about how Trump's politically motivated actions are destabilizing the broader financial and economic system.
"Having objective, nonpartisan data, just boring data that is put together with high quality and integrity — that is needed for our economic and political debates. And to threaten that just makes us poor as a country," Michael Horrigan, who formerly oversaw the bureau's employment measurement programs and is now president of the nonprofit W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told NPR this month.
And yet, investors are shrugging it all off. U.S. markets are on a record-breaking tear, despite their April freak-out over the potential consequences of Trump's tariffs. The president softened and delayed some of those import taxes after the market reaction, especially among investors in the U.S. government bonds that undergird the global financial system. But as of last week, Trump's tariffs of 15% on most imports are now broadly in effect.
Sonnenfeld predicts that it'll take another markets sell-off — and much more dramatic signs that tariffs are damaging the U.S. economy — before CEOs feel empowered to oppose Trump more publicly. He expects inflation to worsen significantly by the end of the year, at which point, he said, business leaders will have more "air cover" to criticize the president.
Business leaders don't want their criticism to "look like it's just coming from an ideological perspective," Sonnenfeld said. "They need to show a dollars-and-cents justification."
In the meantime, he has a recommendation for how the titans of American capitalism can stand up for their independence — even if it's also a tactic beloved by labor unions and other traditional critics of corporate executives and free-market capitalism.
"They can't do it on their own," Sonnenfeld said. "The only way you take down a bully is through collective action."
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