Reports that Donald Trump is successfully wooing back the nation's CEO's as he makes his third run for the presidency were thoroughly dismantled by the head of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute in a column in the New York Times on Sunday.
Bluntly stating Trump ally's claims of CEO support as "far from the truth," Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld pointed out that not "a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century."
For those who cite several billionaires like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks as having thrown their wholehearted support behind Trump, he claimed they are the exception rather than the rule.
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After explaining, "I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans, " he added, " They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party."
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"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," he wrote. "Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide and conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly."
Writing that "Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts," Sonnenfeld suggested, "t was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable earlier this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks."
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