CEOs aren't impressed by Trump, but they're 'flocking' to him anyway [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

A growing number of CEOs have come to believe that Donald Trump is clueless. They're "flocking" to him anyway. It's the result of a misguided calculus.

Link to tweet

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ceos-arent-impressed-trump-re-flocking-anyway-rcna157745

The presumptive GOP nominee had another chance to make a better impression later in the day, during a gathering with corporate executives. As NBC News reported, that appearance wasn’t a success, either.

Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC. ... Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on “Squawk Box.”

One CEO who attended the closed-door event said plainly, “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

.....Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund executive who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, told Politico, “You need a democracy to have effective capitalism. If you don’t, you get cronyism. You get oligarchy. You get crony capitalism. You get arbitrary and capricious administration to the law, which reduces people’s tendency to invest in your country.”

It’s an important point. I realize there will be some — inside corporate boardrooms and out — who look at the 2024 presidential race and effectively say, “Democracy is all well and good, but I’m more concerned about my wallet.”

That calculus is misguided, in part because Trump is unlikely to deliver the economic utopia he’s promising — he’s already failed once — and in part because moving away from democracy is inherently bad for the economy.

It’s something Business Roundtable members might want to keep in mind as they weigh whether to rally behind a presidential hopeful who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”