New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin on Friday delivered a “brutal” report on Donald Trump’s meeting with top U.S. chief executive officers (CEOs), telling CNBC that those who met with the former president found him “meandering,” and walked away from the event “less predisposed” to voting for him over President Joe Biden.
Trump on Thursday met with about 100 corporate leaders, including Apple’s Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, at a Business Roundtable event in Washington D.C., Financial Times reports.
According to Financial Times, at least one attendee said Trump “came across as solid, almost business-like, and not something else like we sometimes see.”
But Sorkin’s sources in the room told a different story, according to a CNBC report labeled by Biden spokesperson James Singer as “brutal.”
“I will say, I was surprised,” Sorkin said of his sources' reactions to the event.
The New York Times columnist continued:
I spoke to enough CEOs who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish — or thinking that they might be leaning that direction — who said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map. Which may not be surprising, but was interesting to me because these were people who I think might have been actually predisposed to him, actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him — actually predisposed to thinking, "this is not necessary."
“As one person said, 'This might not be any different or better than a Biden thought, if you’re thinking that way,'” Sorkin added.
In the meeting, Trump, Financial Times reports, “discussed his right-wing economic agenda and bashed President Joe Biden’s handling of global events, from the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel.”
According to the report, he also “told his audience he would consider lowering the 21 per cent corporate tax rate even further, after cutting it from 35 per cent in 2017.”
Watch Sorkin's report below or at this link.