Countries and Business Trying to Appease . . .
There is no bargaining with Trump and expecting an equal agreement benefiting one’s self even if all you possess is given up to achieve what you desire. He will take what you have leaving nothing behind.
Most recently, the Europeans stood up to Trump. Then suddenly Greenland was off the table. For Europe? Their efforts in saying “no” to Trump can move him into agreeing with them for now. Maybe later it will change again. It is a relief, he is no longer threating with the use of the U.S.
The saying of no to Trump??? It did result in his backing off (for now). It does prove he can reverse himself if enough countries push back.
At least for now.
“Big Business Should End Its Faustian Bargain with Trump”
When Donald Trump returned to power, America’s billionaires and the leaders of its biggest corporations rushed to prostrate themselves at his feet. Some of them, especially but not only among the tech bros, did so because they themselves wanted an authoritarian regime that would stamp out wokeness. I still recall the top banker who, after Trump won, told the Financial Times that:
“I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
Many business leaders, however, understood how dangerous Trump was — they knew he was the least qualified individual, intellectually, psychologically, and morally, ever to occupy the White House. In the aftermath of January 9th, many Fortune 500 corporations announced to great acclaim that they would stop donating to Republicans. But after a few months of Republican threats of retaliation, those companies quietly turned the spigot back on.
I am sure they convinced themselves the Trump of January 6 was an aberration. In their minds, with enough flattery and bribes donations, and with Treasury Secretary Bessent to quietly steer the ship, Trump could be managed the way he was during his first term. Bessent, they figured, was a sensible businessman like them. After all, Bessent had worked closely with George Soros – the bête noire of the Right — and ultimately ran his own hedge fund. Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-trade and anti-democracy rhetoric, they reasoned, was just a show in order to get elected.
Bessent certainly understood that he was a critical actor in this supposed charade. For example, when Trump first began threatening to impose enormous tariffs on our trading partners, Bessent avowed that this was only a “bargaining tactic” in order to calm panicked markets. Moreover, believing that the extremism was a charade was made much easier by Corporate America’s expectations of future profits from the conventional right-wing parts of his agenda: tax cuts plus increased freedom to pollute and defraud consumers, along with lax financial regulation and permissive anti-trust. No more pesky Democrats to get in their way.
Even now people continue to treat TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — as if it were an established fact, although the past few weeks show that it’s just wishful thinking. On tariffs, does this look like TACO to you?
Source: Penn Wharton Budget Model
Oh, and here’s a chart that also doesn’t look very TACO to me:
Source: New York Times
Granted, Trump sometimes appears to back down. We probably won’t be invading Greenland over the next few weeks. But this is only a temporizing tactic while he finds other means to escalate, such as imposing tariffs on countries that came to Greenland’s aid. Overall, Trump 47 is escalating, day by day.
The persistence of the TACO myth is part of the broader picture: Many people, especially in the business world, are still trying to convince themselves that they’ll do OK despite Trump’s craziness. Hey, the stock market is up, isn’t it? (It is, but US stocks, which are up 16 percent over the past year, have lagged stocks in other advanced countries, which rose 33 percent in 2025.)
Well, I have news for American business leaders: You will not do OK.
I’m not just talking about the threat Trump’s madness poses for corporate bottom lines, although that threat is larger than most people realize. For example, as Trump barrels into confrontation with Europe over Greenland, of all things — even I still have trouble believing that this is happening — I’m surprised not to see more people mention that U.S. corporations have invested around $4 trillion in Europe, investments that will definitely be at risk if this confrontation spirals out of control.
I’m also talking about the personal risks businesspeople increasingly face from a regime that demands abject, performative sycophancy.
Yesterday, Scott Bessent (the purported grown-up in the room) appeared on TV, delivering a cringe-inducing defense of Trump’s apparent willingness to blow up NATO in order to gain control of Greenland (!):
Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we’re the hottest country in the world, we’re the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength.
Since the tariff-setting authority Trump is claiming only applies in a national emergency, Bessent was asked what national emergency justifies imposing tariffs in an attempt to seize Greenland. His answer: “The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.”
Who knows what Trump has on Bessent, but it’s clear that Bessent made a Faustian bargain, selling his soul in return for . . . something. And the terms of the bargain clearly require that he humiliate himself in public on a regular basis. He no longer acts like a respectable Wall Street insider; now he behaves like a capo helping his mob boss run a protection racket.
The degradation of Scott Bessent serves as an illustration of where anyone who thinks they can manage Trump will end up. Corporate America needs to realize that they too must make Faustian bargains if they want to stay on Trump’s good side – and that the price of those bargains will be very high. Campaign contributions won’t be enough: they must pour money into Trump’s ballroom, and/or his family’s pocket, and/or his crazy adventures in places like Venezuela or Gaza. Refraining from criticism of Trump’s policies won’t be enough. Instead they must become sycophants, enthusiastically supporting Trump’s policies — especially if those policies are deeply stupid. If they don’t go along the punishment will be personal as well as financial.
Thus Trump lashed out at Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, for blurting out the obvious truth that Venezuelan oil is “uninvest able.” Then Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, mildly suggested that undermining the Federal Reserve’s independence might be a bad idea. Dimon didn’t even mention the truly disturbing part of the story, the announcement that the Department of Justice had begun an obviously groundless criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, whose only crime was not taking Trump’s orders on interest rate policy. Sure enough, Trump not only lashed out at Dimon but threatened to sue JPMorgan for allegedly “debanking” him after Jan. 6. This comes from a president who has pardoned criminals convicted (sometimes multiple times) for defrauding consumers of billions of dollars.
The lesson for businesspeople is that Faustian bargains never end well. Take a lesson from watching Scott Bessent – appease Trump and he will demand that you debase yourself even further. It’s been astonishing how quickly corporate greed has been replaced by corporate fear: Businesses who hoped to profit from Trump now toe the line because they’re afraid of being punished.
But despite what corporate CEOs tell themselves, they do have a choice. The reality is that Trump is growing weaker by the day. Americans aren’t falling into line behind his attempted authoritarian takeover. On the contrary, their resistance is stiffening. The Trumpists can’t even cow Minneapolis into submission, let alone the rest of the country. As he flails wildly in an attempt to recapture his lost momentum, his policies keep getting crazier.
So businesspeople have a choice: Continue to abase themselves, destroying their dignity and their reputations, in an attempt to curry favor with a wannabe dictator who’s falling short, or show some spine. And that stiffening of the spine must be a collective endeavour.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, talking about how to deal with another tyrant: If you don’t hang together, you’ll all hang separately.
Greenland was suddenly off the table because it was always a distraction from whatever is in the Epstein Files, from child-rape to laundering Russian money, they were distracting from. They were lucky this roundly anticipated storm showed up when it did to temporarily distract until they can come up with a new distraction
But we’re heard about that storm that still hasn’t got here for days …
Ten Bears:
It will come eventually in bits and pieces. We will have to jig = saw it together to get most of the story and who the participants were.
Trump probably backed down on Greenland because (a) the financial markets started tanking and (b) somebody explained to him that an all-out economic war with Europe would result in the US getting its ass kicked. Europe is the customer and investor, while the US depends on selling them things and getting them to lend money to keep from defaulting on the national debt. In that situation Europe has the commanding advantages.
How long he’ll be able to keep that in his head is anybody’s guess.
But domestically, it’s a consistent pattern that no matter how loyal somebody is to him, he’ll turn against that person in an instant at the slightest provocation, even an imaginary one. It’s easy to buy him off with money and loyalty, but he doesn’t stay bought. Business leaders with a higher IQ than a plate of mashed potatoes should have figured that out a long time ago.
Infidel:
Thank you and you have the correct conclusion. So what is the solution? More appeasement or push back by Congress? I believe the pushback must come from Congress and then citizens. Citizens are hurting and Congress is thinking about what to do.
It’s Congress’s job to push back against a president who abuses his office or asserts powers beyond his Constitutional ones. The problem is that Republicans have been only very sporadically interested in doing that job, and they hold the majorities in both houses. The deeper problem is that our political system has become so rotted out that members of Congress feel more loyalty and attachment to their party than to their constituents or to the branch of government they serve in. The even deeper problem is that over the last century or so we’ve allowed the president to be built up into an exalted and almost kinglike personage rather than his proper role as the humble and obedient executor of Congress’s will.
Assuming the Democrats get control of Congress in November (and it’s far, far too early now to make predictions), maybe we’ll see more pushback from there. So far, the pushback has come almost entirely from the people themselves. Unfortunately (to return to the main point of the post) the typical CEO is neither as smart nor as courageous as the typical garbageman or soccer mom. Very few businesses are going to help. The real story of this time is on the streets of Minneapolis and at the No Kings rallies, not in the halls of power in Washington.
As time passes I grow ever more wary of assumptions
The only safe assumption is there will be no election. They’re already attacking vote-by-mail, something you and I have done in Oregon since 1988. They will do everything they can to cancel or rig this election
I don’t understand why people don’t get it: they have carried us across a line, and if people don’t fight back we will die …
@Ten,
“The only safe assumption is there will be no election.”
WWSD (What Would Stalin Do)?
Infidel:
Congress must take action, Even Republicans, which would include Eli Crane of Arizona. Congress represents the people and not moneyed Wall Street. What I have seen is a resistance to this government. However, it is not to the extent of what occurred in the late sixties and early seventies. I do not see enough anger being portrayed over the murder of two citizens.
Yes, the system put lame and weak-kneed fools in Congress. Not much being said by our elected representatives or Senators. It looks like we are on our own.
@ Bill,
From the Boston Globe:
“Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Saturday evening that Democrats would “not provide the votes” for a government funding bill this week if appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security are included without new guidelines for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The statement comes after federal agents earlier in the day shot and killed a Minneapolis man, identified as 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who was filming their activities.
“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling — and unacceptable in any American city,” he said in a statement. “Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE. I will vote no.”
“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included,” he said.
“It will take 60 votes for the funding legislation to clear the Senate; Republicans hold 53 seats, and would need help from seven Democrats to avoid a partial government shutdown.”
On the other hand, I haven’t heard anything from any of the 3rd party presidential candidates. What are *they* doing to shut down ICE?
Joel:
Democrats and Republics have said little to Trump. Republicans also know better. This president is taking the law in his own hands. It is time for him to go. Where is Congress in all of this? Is it left up to voters to do something? Where is the media? They should be screaming their heads off by now.
@Bill,
“Where is Congress in all of this?”
It is under the control of the Trump GOP. Until control of Congress changes, nothing will change.
The voters will have a chance to vote in November. Unless Trump cancels the elections.
The media I read is all over this. Of course, the media I read isn’t owned by large corporations, so there’s that.
The crickets you hear are the 3rd party candidates for president, who only appear every four years to grift the rubes.
Joel:
They still have an obligation to citizens and the nation. Now we know, they will sacrifice us. No real people in this mix of politicians.
3rd party candidates grifting rubes ~ like RFK lowercase j … ?
@Ten,
He’s one particularly egregious example.