On Thursday, Trump returned to the scene of the crime for the first time since he was booted out of the White House, after his failed coup and second impeachment. We covered the first of his 3 mini-rallies, the one with House Republicans. The last one was with a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting. Beans were spilled big time afterwards and CNBC’s Christina Wilkie reported that the 80 CEOs were not impressed with the doddering idiot.
“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.
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.
Among the topics on which Trump offered scant details were how he would reduce taxes and cut back on business regulations, according to two other people in the room who spoke to CNBC.
… Trump’s energy in the meeting was also noticeably subdued, according to two people who were in the room. At no time during his remarks was there any noticeable applause for Trump, two attendees told CNBC.
This was in contrast to Trump’s meeting earlier in the day with House Republicans on Capitol Hill. Attendees at that meeting told CNBC that the former president was animated and engaged and that Trump received several rounds of applause in separate meetings Thursday with both House and Senate Republicans.
…Trump’s low-key energy at the Business Roundtable event could have been deliberate, one attendee told CNBC. Trump had wanted the CEO meeting to be “more like a business meeting than a speech,” the person said.
“At one point, he discussed his plan to bring the corporate tax rate down from 21% to 20% … and was asked about why he had chosen 20%,” Sorkin said Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s a round number.’”
“That unto itself had a number of CEOs shaking their heads,” Sorkin reported.
In 2023, corporate income taxes contributed approximately $420 billion to federal revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Wall Street has bristled over the past three years under President Joe Biden’s aggressive antitrust enforcement, pharmaceutical price caps and progressive tax policy.
Also reporting for CNBC, Brian Schwartz wrote that Trump had a clear pitch for the CEOs: “If he is elected president again in November, the CEOs are going to see tax cuts and a curtailment of business regulations, according to people who attended the meeting… Trump said that if he is returned to the White House he will cut taxes, including income taxes, and bring back the same economic policies he enacted during his first term, according to people who were in the meeting.”
Among the CEOs in attendance were banksters Jamie Dimon (JPMoranChase), Jane Fraser (Citigroup), Brian Moynihan (Bank of America) and Charles Scharf (Wells Fargo) as well as Apple’s Tim Cook and Walmart’s Doug McMillon. As part of his standup comedy routine, Trump spoke disparagingly about the waiters in Las Vegas who got all excited over him mentioning that he would make tipped wages non-taxable causing the CEOs to laugh.
Writing about the event for the NY Times, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage reported that Trump had Larry Kudlow [a Trump sock-puppet] with him to make sure he didn’t make too much of a fool of himself. “Trump, who has been trying to woo business leaders as potential donors, told the executives much of what they had hoped to hear. Many leaders in corporate America have been nervous that in a second term, Trump might not be as friendly toward them as he was in his first. Many ended up abandoning him and publicly criticizing him, especially after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump, whose public speeches are often characterized by conspiratorial promises to root ‘Communists’ out of government and hard-line policies such as overseeing the largest deportation operation in American history, was described by one of the people who attended the meeting to have sounded relatively more measured than usual, modulating his messages for the elite audience. He most strikingly softened his language about immigration.”
He is said to have added that in his view, a key reason the economy performed so well in his first term up until the pandemic was his tax cuts— and especially the permanent reduction of the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent in his 2017 tax law.
(Trump inherited from former President Barack Obama a growing economy in the midst of a long and steady recovery from the 2008-09 Great Recession; the economy continued to perform roughly the same until the pandemic. At the end of Trump’s first year in office, he pushed Congress, then controlled by Republicans, to lower the corporate tax rate.)
Trump has proposed extending all of the parts of the 2017 tax cut law that are set to automatically expire at the end of 2025 if Congress does not pass new legislation, including keeping the 2017 law’s lower marginal tax rates across all income levels and its higher threshold for inheritances that are exempted from any estate taxes.
Biden has proposed keeping the law’s lowered rates for modest and middle incomes, but allowing taxes to go back up on personal income above $400,000 and on larger inheritances. He has also proposed raising the corporate rate to 28 percent.
Biden has argued that because his plan would make the wealthy and corporations pay more, it would make up the loss in government revenue from extending the tax cuts on lower and middle levels of income, and therefore not add to the national debt. Fully extending the 2017 law, which Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress financed through government borrowing, would add trillions in additional government debt if not paired with new spending cuts.
Trump’s tax cuts have become something of a rallying cry for the business elite and his wealthy donors and potential donors, who are worried that the parts of the cuts that most benefit them will expire next year without Republican control in Washington.
A corporate tax rate close to 20 percent was one of Trump’s demands during the fight over his tax cut bill in 2017, a law that Republicans rushed to pass by the end of that year.
Trump said other things on Thursday that seemed to reassure the chief executives, according to the people who were in the room. After delivering his standard campaign lines about millions of immigrants pouring across the border under Biden, Trump talked up the importance of high-skilled immigration, saying he knew businesses needed these workers, the three people said.
Trump said he thought it was “wrong” that people who made sacrifices to come to America and attend top U.S. schools should have to go home to their countries, one of the people said. Another person who was in the room recalled that Trump made the point that the high-skilled immigrants who received an American education could either be successful in the U.S. or in their home countries. He said that the best and the brightest were needed to help America, this person said.
Business leaders were among those who repeatedly urged Trump to change his restrictive immigration policies during his time in office; he would often signal to these leaders that he agreed with their push for high-skilled immigration, while enacting policies that would make it more difficult. The Trump administration took steps to restrict visas for high-skilled workers as the pandemic drastically altered how the economy functioned.
Trump, who was convicted last month of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn actress during the 2016 election, offered some other lines to please the chief executives. Among them, he talked about his deregulation agenda and his desire to speed up the permit process for businesses.
In April, Trump dined with oil company executives and lobbyists at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and told them that they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry, according to two people who attended that dinner.
For months, Trump has faced a gaping campaign cash deficit with Biden, and he has been hunting for major donors since well before he became the nominee. But his search has grown more fruitful since he became the presumptive Republican nominee, and as some business leaders have grown more vocally opposed to Biden’s policies.
Now, a number of those leaders are gradually submitting to the reality that Trump could win the White House again, and are far more receptive to his pitch even as several privately insist they remain personally repulsed by him.
Still, Trump continues to call for another economic measure that business interests generally oppose, reiterating to a group of House Republicans earlier on Thursday that he favored imposing much higher tariffs on most imported goods.
Such import taxes would increase costs for corporations that import raw materials and equipment, and could set off a global trade war and retaliatory tariffs that would make it harder for American companies to sell their products overseas.
Are Trump's mental facilities functioning properly? Not all 78 year olds have cognitively declined as steeply as he has.
He is a moron. He knows nothing about anything. His promises mean nothing. That he gets any respect and all these people listen to him is astonishing, disheartening and frightening beyond belief.