America’s Most Powerful CEOs Are Awfully Quiet Lately

For a few brief, shining moments, the dream of Milton Friedman must have seemed closer to reality in corporate America than ever before. Donald Trump had been reelected president, and the tax cuts and regulatory loosening he’d promised were on the horizon. Whatever leverage ordinary workers had managed to scrape together in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic had mostly been quashed, and surely the incoming administration would take care of what remained. Gone, too, were the days when executives would have to evince corporate disapproval of racism or sexism or homophobia if they didn’t feel like it, as many of them had been goaded into doing during #MeToo or the Black Lives Matter movement. They could get out of talking about politics—which is not quite the same as getting out of politics, period—and get back to maximizing shareholder value however they pleased.

For many executives, this sense of newfound freedom didn’t last all that long. The Trump administration’s actions—on a whole host of issues, but especially its brutal treatment of suspected immigrants—have the general public looking for prominent people and institutions to use their power or influence like they did just a few years ago. This time, though, the country has been met with near-total silence and has been left to speculate about why. Surely, some of these execs simply support the administration and its policies, or they’ve already maneuvered to benefit from them. Some fear punishment—not unreasonably so—or want to preserve their ability to seek merger approvals, tariff carve-outs or lucrative government contracts. Others are relying on TACO, the acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out that’s been popular among bankers tracking the president’s response to stock market panics, which posits that waiting the administration out usually yields good-enough results.