U.S. business leaders who supported Trump have betrayed America and themselves

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Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

There were many sober critiques to be made of Kamala Harris’s pitch to the American people. None of those criticisms should have led someone invested in the long-run success of the U.S. private sector, and the general welfare of the American people, to support Donald Trump. That so many business leaders in the United States did so anyway warrants our scrutiny and our condemnation.

These are executives and founders whose contributions to society and human innovation that I, for the most part, greatly respect, whose general intelligence I do not doubt, and whose concerns I do not dismiss lightly, even if I substantively disagree with them. But for this election, I am shocked at their conclusions.

I am speaking of course, of Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk, who has campaigned vehemently for Mr. Trump and defended his election conspiracies.

I am speaking of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who overcame his horror at Mr. Trump’s insurrectionist comments to endorse him in May.

I am speaking of Marc Andreessen, who went from being a lifelong Democrat to donating millions to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

I am speaking of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who despite not publicly supporting Mr. Trump himself, conveniently overturned decades of Washington Post policy of endorsing presidential candidates right before the paper was about to endorse Ms. Harris.

Even a cynical, purely profit-driven businessperson should have supported Ms. Harris. Even a hawkish conservative voter concerned about waning American international influence and preserving its economic weight should have supported Ms. Harris. To say nothing of the dangerous precedent that a second Trump presidency sets for liberal democracy at large, Mr. Trump is simply not a responsible steward for the American economy and its foreign policy.

Mr. Trump’s choice of JD Vance as running mate betrays his ultimate indifference to economic growth and the value of business, except as a talking point at rallies. Mr. Trump’s obsession with protectionism, even if only viewed generously as a bargaining chip, threatens jobs and risks raising the cost of living for everyone.

His disregard for Federal Reserve independence politicizes what is supposed to be a neutral, technocratic institution, greatly undermining its ability to manage inflation, which is the crux of his criticism of Joe Biden. His proposed tax cuts go well beyond what might help for growth and would drive up debt by trillions. His chronic favouritism and erratic approach to policy is exactly the opposite of what stable, meritocratic capitalism needs to function smoothly.

But it is not simply his economic management that matters for American businesses. The inescapable fact is that the long-run sustainability of U.S. democracy is a precondition for the military and economic exceptionalism that many of these business leaders are so invested in. If Americans no longer believe that American elections are fair, then the country is one step further from its fellow advanced economies, and one step closer to the political deadlock of Venezuela.

Reflect for a second on who America’s chief adversaries, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, would prefer in this election. To them, Mr. Trump is not the confident defender of American industry and military might. To them, he signals opportunities in Ukraine and Taiwan, the endemic malfunctioning of liberal democracy and the twilight of Western supremacy.

How could it be that these American executives and Mr. Putin have more common interests in this election than these people have with Ms. Harris? If the 2024 Democrats are truly the existential threat to America’s tech dominance that Mr. Andreessen believes, surely Russia and China should welcome Ms. Harris’s ascent to the Oval Office. But such an image defies credulity.

Perhaps some of these executives are overreacting to woke politics. Others are focused narrowly on specific foreign policy objectives like support for Israel. It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan stepped on one too many toes in her sweeping antitrust reforms. The Harris proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is admittedly ridiculous and has drawn particular ire.

But any realistic attempt to stack these concerns against Mr. Trump’s incoherent policy agenda, utter lack of fitness for office and disdain for democracy, ought to suggest that even the most conservative American founders and executives should be willing to live with the Democrats for another four years.

In any democracy, we expect people like Mr. Trump to crawl out from the woodwork to seek the power and validation of high office. We even expect that, sometimes, large enough swathes of people will be drawn to their populist tactics to win them an election. But it is baffling and saddening that otherwise intelligent people with so much skin in the game can be swept along so easily with everyone else.