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One of the most wrong-headed and destructive myths in American life is that businessmen know what they are doing. It’s a myth that has led to another long-held notion among a good many Americans, especially Republicans, that the government itself is in better hands when businessmen rule than when politicians or bureaucrats do. 

As one young woman, a Trump supporter, recently told The New York Times regarding the president, “He’s a businessman at his core. So I knew he was going to bring those aggressive negotiation skills and those power plays into the presidential thing.”

And that, of course, was a good thing to her. Donald Trump would know how to wheel and deal, he would know how to streamline government because, after all, businesses are all about efficiency, he would know how to command because that is what CEO’s do. And he would know how to manage an economy — never mind that he inherited most of his money and declared six bankruptcies. We know because he himself kept telling us how stupendous his business acumen was, and since when does Trump lie?

And let’s not forget another destructive myth that abetted Trump in his electoral success: that Republicans, as the so-called “business party,” actually do a better job with the economy than Democrats — when all the data shows exactly the opposite, and it isn’t even close. Republicans often wreck the economy. 

Like Trump, what businessmen do know is how to brainwash us into believing in the supremacy of their business skills. Basically salesmen, they know how to sell themselves to willing dupes.

In fact, Trump, that business genius who doesn’t seem to understand the basics of Economics 101, has been taking down our economy since the day he took office — a day, by the way, when he was supposed to end inflation. 

The Government = Business Myth

Of course, the idea that a businessman would be a better steward of the government than politicians and bureaucrats was always a self-serving absurdity. The skills that businessmen possess not only have very little to do with governing, they are also, in many respects, antithetical to governing — since the basic mission of government isn’t accruing, it is dispensing; it isn’t obfuscation, it is transparency; it isn’t protecting business from government, it is protecting the people from business; and it isn’t serving stockholders, it is serving the American public. 

A businessman president is probably the last thing this country ever needed — at least a democratic country, as this one used to be. In fact, keeping business moguls as far away from government as possible in any capacity may be a necessary safeguard to preserve what little is left of democracy.

And if anyone should have realized this, it should have been the captains of corporate America themselves. They should have known that a vainglorious ignoramus like Trump might very well destroy the economy. 

They should have known that tariffs were a stupid idea, much less one that would, as Trump boasted, obviate the need for an income tax; that the president taking control of the Fed, as Trump wishes, would wreak havoc on the economy by politicizing every decision; that firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because Trump wanted those statistics tilted in his favor would make the data worthless to business; that defunding science research would tank one of the nation’s major advantages vis a vis other countries; that deporting immigrants who pick our crops and build our homes would blow a hole in the economy that Americans couldn’t or didn’t want to fill. 

They should have known, and they should have fought Trump tooth and nail, not only for their own interests but, if they cared at all, for the national interest. Instead, as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy put it, “The titans of American capitalism can’t be relied on to push back against him [Trump].” On the contrary, they can be relied on to encourage him, even as he is taking down the economy.

The Mystery of the Grovel

The question is why they have become slavish devotees to a man steering the nation toward recession — why one of the very few potential bulwarks against Trump seems eager to indulge him and his economic fantasies. 

Indeed, Trump has had many enablers in his relentless campaign to destroy American democracy and install himself as monarch (he is now building his own Versailles in the White House). But among the most empowering of them are the heads of America’s business community, and the most empowering among those titans are the very richest members of that community: the elite — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, the Silicon Valley bros, and the venture capitalists like Peter Thiel — all of whom have democracy in their gunsights and Trump on their throne. 

It is a rather remarkable display of sycophancy and a sickening one precisely because these are, after all, the richest men in the world — men much richer than Trump — men who terrorize everyone else.

They compete to see which of them can grovel before Trump best. They make pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. They bestow gifts upon Trump — Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook handed him a gold-plated trophy — and sing his praises. They turn obsequiousness into a fine art. 

These men aren’t all idiots. They know — they must know — that Trump is a fool. Everyone does. But, or so we are told, Donald Trump scares the hell out of them, so grovel they must.

But must they, really? It is a rather remarkable display of sycophancy and a sickening one precisely because these are, after all, the richest men in the world — men much richer than Trump — men who terrorize everyone else. They are cold, bloodless, ruthless, fully self-interested — the Trumps of their own spheres, and the very models of the Ayn Rand hero whom the right wing worships. They don’t need to bow and scrape. 

Once upon a time, corporate chieftains had what New York Times business reporter Noam Schreiber called a “patrician civic-mindedness,” and Schreiber said that “many at least thought of themselves as working in the national interest.” Those days are long gone. You don’t need me to tell you that the current titans are, to put it bluntly, jerks. Just look at what Musk did to the country. Just look at how rapidly they fell into line when Trump dismantled initiatives to help women and minorities.

Trump’s Intuitive Grasp of Cowardice, Cruelty, and Chaos

The obvious answer to why these jerks genuflect before Trump and the one adduced most often, is that they are operating out of self-protection. It may be a cliché but a truthful one nonetheless, that corporate moguls nowadays care about one thing and one thing only: money, their own first and their shareholders second. 

I have said in past posts that Trump had a keen intuition for the conditions that would raze the edifice of American democracy. He understood the deep attraction in this country to chaos, for destroying the prevailing social order. And he played upon it, especially among white Christian males who felt the order was arrayed against them. 

And he understood the deep attraction for cruelty in this nation, for subjugating anyone who wasn’t a white Christian male and then playing upon those men’s sense of grievance and overwhelming self-pity in joining his so-called retribution. (Immigrants are now paying that heavy price.) 

But he understood this too: Capitalism, for all the praise showered upon it by conservatives as the very engine of America, is essentially driven by craven men, and this craven capitalism would eventually lead to him, to Trump, because the most powerful men in America would have no compunction about selling out democracy, as he did, if they could gain from doing so — the country be damned.

Trump knew all about money lust from his own lust, and he knew that for a rich man to lose a nickel would be regarded as a personal catastrophe — an unconscionable catastrophe. 

So the billionaires, these alleged giants, were ripe for the taking, even letting Trump in some cases seize a chunk of their own businesses without their pushing back because they apparently thought the pushback would be more costly to them given Trump’s penchant for retribution. 

In a recent podcast with the Atlantic’s David Frum, the philosopher Sam Harris, looking at business cravenness, asked, “How many billions of dollars do you need to have a spine?” We know the answer: There is no fortune large enough for a business mogul to grow a spine. Spineless they are. Spineless they shall always be. And Trump knew.

He knew cravenness when he saw it. He knew that he could treat these billionaires like targets in a protection racket he was running. (Trump has been compared to a Mafioso so many times that I suspect the Mafia is insulted.) 

And Trump wasn’t surreptitious about it. He did it right out in the open. Pay me and get more or risk my wrath and lose more. If Paramount wanted to sell out to Skydance, it had to pay him tribute in the form of a $16 million settlement of a frivolous suit he had filed over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris; and, though Paramount came up with a flimsy pretext, it had to pull Stephen Colbert from the air as well. 

Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shelled out $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump had filed claiming that Facebook had censored him after January 6 when he led a coup; X ponied up $10 million for a similar suspension; YouTube paid $24.5 million, also for suspending him after January 6. 

“The law was on their side,” Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, told The New York Times. But, he said, they were “buying influence” and “currying favor.” 

Still, you might think they would have been irate or at least indignant at this shakedown. But they weren’t, not publicly at any rate. They accepted their own cravenness too. Indeed, they flaunted it. They actually went to great lengths they needn’t had to have gone to. Skydance is selling out CBS News by handing it over to right-wing extremists. Meta and X took down their monitoring systems so that right-wing content wouldn’t be censored. Giant law firms lined up to do hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work for Trump’s causes.

And then there was the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco where FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC for allegedly being insufficiently abject after Charlie Kirk’s murder. (This on top of the $16 million it extorted from ABC for George Stephanopoulos having said that Trump had molested E. Jean Carroll.) 

ABC put up no resistance, caving immediately like the rest of them, though in this case ABC later recanted, as we all know, because the public rose up and issued its own threat to ABC’s parent, the Disney Company. 

It is worth noting that in the dictionary definition of craven, it isn’t only cowardice; it is “contemptible” cowardice. Nearly every business, every institution, Trump has confronted qualifies. Either lick Trump’s jackboots or defend democracy and lose a few bucks. It was never much of a contest which they would do. As I said, Trump knew cravenness when he saw it.

Big Bullies Admire Bigger Bullies

But I believe the willingness to do anything to pacify Trump if it meant making a few extra bucks was not the only or perhaps even the primary affinity these big shots had with Trump. I rather think they liked Trump’s bullying, or, at the very least, respected it. 

They were bullies themselves (again, look at Musk and DOGE). And just as Trump reviled government, so did the titans who resented the audacity of government attempting to regulate them, as if trying to protect the public from their malfeasance was itself a crime against humanity. 

And just as Trump hated women and minorities, I suspect the titans hated the women and minorities with whom they had to share their boardrooms with the advent of DEI, and there are no titans more misogynistic than the Silicon Valley bros who also happened to be Trump’s biggest fans. So Trump not only ran a protection racket against his own depredations; he ran a protection racket against the protests of women and minorities.

But there was one more affinity between these titans and Trump, and among the titans, Trump, and authoritarianism itself — an affinity that throws a bright beam on one of the nation’s primary afflictions under Trump. 

It is this: Trump and the titans, and authoritarians generally, shared the same antipathy toward morality. Morality was the titans’ enemy, not Trump.

What Trump gave them, then, was not just some financial crumbs, though he did. He gave them a much greater gift. He gave them a lack of accountability for their sins — the very gift his admirers had given him. Or you could put it this way: He freed them from having to apologize for being jerks.

It was a natural fit. As Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who bedeviled the monopolies at the turn of the last century, put it, “Business is war,” and “morals have nothing to do with its practice.” 

This, I believe, was what enslaved the titans to Trump, as much as if not more than their fear that he would sic the government on them if they didn’t worship him: They were partners with Trump in amorality, and they realized that no matter what Trump did to them, no matter how he squeezed them for his own profit and power, tolerating that was much safer than facing the moral howls of folks like Tarbell or, now, Elizabeth Warren, or the leaders of the Me Too movement or civil rights activists or any person or group fighting for social justice. 

The money part counted because morality could endanger their making more of it. Morality was what separated the civilized from the barbarians, the Democrats from the Republicans, and the titans from most of the rest of us. What Trump gave them, then, was not just some financial crumbs, though he did. He gave them a much greater gift. He gave them a lack of accountability for their sins — the very gift his admirers had given him.

Or you could put it this way: He freed them from having to apologize for being jerks.

Related: Capitalism, Fascism, Trump, and America’s Not-So-Free “Free Market Economy”

Every Mogul Adores a Fascist?

To say that business has no scruples, no ethics, no moral bearing might sound like leftwing cant if it weren’t all too true. 

Businesses exist to generate money; they do not exist to generate morality. And they will toss aside the latter whenever they can, as quickly as they can. The list of examples is endless, but here are just a random few: Brown & Williamson and other cigarette manufacturers who knew that their product caused cancer; the hundreds if not thousands of corporate polluters who knew they were poisoning our drinking water and despoiling our environment; the biggest banks and investment firms in America, like Lehman Brothers, who knew that they were overextended on unsustainable mortgages in 2008 and yet let the economy blow up; the coal companies that disregarded safety regulations; Boeing that knew its 737 Max had issues that resulted in crashes but went on selling that plane nonetheless; Purdue Pharma that knowingly addicted millions of Americans to its opioids; World Com that defrauded investors out of $100 billion by inflating assets: Volkswagen that rigged emission tests as its cars belched gas into the air; FTX cryptocurrency that secretly transferred funds to a sister corporation at the expense of its investors; Enron that inflated its profits; and even Boar’s Head meats whose sanitation problems at a factory led to a listeria outbreak and 10 deaths. 

In effect, they would kill you rather than sacrifice profits. 

And let’s not forget our president, who stiffed his vendors, defrauded “students” paying for courses at his “university,” and inflated the value of his assets when applying for bank loans. To put a final and even finer point on it, there are the purveyors of AI, who, as David Frum remarked, are telling us, “Just warning: Side effect of the thing I’m working on may be the extinction of human life on Earth. So that’s a possibility. In fact, not a negligible one, but I’m doing it anyway.”

This is the America they want to inhabit — Trump’s America — which is to say, all of these corporate kingpins are not amoral because they are in business; they are in business because they are amoral.

Which takes us to that compact with Trump and authoritarianism. Virtually, everywhere that authoritarianism has reared its head, the business titans have readily caved to it, just as they did here. As Robert Paxton, the great historian of fascism, described it, “In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes,” which may be something of an understatement. In Italy, they even ran Mussolini’s corporatist organization. 

But it is important to note that businesses aren’t just cooperative with authoritarians. They are practitioners of authoritarianism themselves. In Nazi Germany in the waning days of World War II, Volkswagen set up a Kinderheim or “children’s house” outside one of its factories for the infants of conscripted female workers — only it wasn’t a house; it was a death camp. With the full knowledge, approval, and order of the Volkswagen executives, the infants were left to starve to death — something that appalled even the local Nazi gauleiter who called for a more humane way to kill them. Again, that was Volkswagen, not the Nazis. 

Closer in time, this very week in a federal courtroom in New York, BNP, France’s largest bank and one with a branch in New York, is being tried for financing the genocide that had been conducted by the authoritarian Bashir government in South Sudan — again, fully aware of how its money was being used to pay soldiers and mercenaries to kill, maim, and rape the victims. You might call it genocide for profit.

We are talking about huge corporations and astonishing moral lacunae. And we are talking about cowards who cower before Trump because he threatens their billions as their opposite numbers in Germany and Italy were threatened eighty years ago. 

But it is important to realize that the cowardice functions only because morality no longer does. If you want to understand why the richest and most powerful men in America enable Trump, why they disdain democracy and encourage autocracy, why they refuse to defend their own rights and interests other than the right to make money, it isn’t really because they are afraid of Trump, even if they are. 

It is because they lack the moral conviction that could steel them to resist him, and choose to further enrich themselves instead. 

Saying that they have caved to Trump makes them sound as if they are victims. Craven they are. But these men are not his victims; they are his accomplices: brothers in amorality. They will do anything to make that extra nickel.

And only our own moral pushback can beat them in this craven country of ours.

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. This column has been adapted, with the author’s permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.