Corporate America's titans, including Amazon, are playing nice and hoping to avoid Trump's wrath. - Bing Guan/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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America’s CEOs have spent much of second Trump administration cutting million-dollar checks for his inauguration fund, putting out press releases touting their “new” investments in domestic production, and generally keeping quiet about the administration’s defiance of democratic norms. Any pushback against the White House’s trashing of the global economic order has been handled behind closed doors.
The corporate elite are playing nice, hoping that doing so will buy them time before President Donald Trump backs off on his profit-eroding, stock-depressing tariffs. Keep calm and carry on. Don’t poke the bear. Pick your favorite passive platitude to get through the next *checks watch* 1,362 days.
Trouble is, quiet diplomacy is not working. The trade war is raging, and no US company appears to have secured immunity. (Ask Nvidia, which did the whole song and dance of announcing a $500 billion investment in domestic AI infrastructure earlier this month, only to turn around and see the White House ban it from the Chinese market.)
Meanwhile, brands that stay quiet are leaving a giant opportunity on the table.
On Tuesday, a single story about Amazon, published by the Beltway-insider news site Punchbowl, prompted an outsize reaction from the White House. In a briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the report — saying Amazon planned to display the cost of tariffs next to a product’s list price — a “hostile and political act” by the company.
(Amazon, for its part, said the price display plan was considered but “was never approved and is not going to happen.”)
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, joined by Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, held up a news article featuring a photo of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. - Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
The same morning, a furious Trump personally called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to complain about the perceived slight, two senior White House officials told CNN’s Alayna Treene.
“Of course he was pissed,” said one of the officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Why should a multibillion dollar company pass off costs to consumers?”
Let’s unpack that for a moment.
The official is saying that Amazon owes it to Trump, the person imposing taxes on all imports in the first place, to absorb the costs. Why? Because higher prices resulting from tariffs make Trump look like the bad guy.
Bezos, who like other tech titans has cozied up to Trump, apparently got the message.
“He was terrific,” Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “He solved the problem very quickly. Good guy.”
Just for fun: Let’s say Bezos didn’t solve the problem and instead told Trump that if he didn’t like high consumer prices he could simply stop the tariff madness with a single pen stroke. What would happen?
Trump would lash out, as he’s done with other CEOs and companies that didn’t immediately fall in line. He could make life very annoying and expensive for Amazon through investigations and regulatory roadblocks. Amazon’s stock would probably take a hit, which would shave a few billion off the $209 billion fortune of the world’s second-richest person.
None of that would sink Amazon, the $2 trillion multinational cloud-computing, streaming and ad sales behemoth, which also runs the world’s largest e-commerce platform.
But it would be, again, very annoying. And to what end?
More bark than bite?
Trump’s penchant for retribution has kept business leaders from saying or doing anything that would hurt the bottom line. That was especially true this fall, when Trump won re-election (and, for the first time, the popular vote).
Now might be a good time for CEOs recalibrate their appetite for risk.
“The Trump army is divided, and it’s got more bark than bite, snapping at every dog in the park,” Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business, wrote in a blog post last week. “Does anybody take him or his threats seriously anymore?”
Galloway argues that most CEOs privately agree that Trump’s policies are “dangerous and stupid,” and that creates an opportunity. The first executive to come out forcefully to resist the president “could reap significant benefits, both reputationally and commercially.”
Any corporation looking for inspiration, he writes, should take a look a Harvard, the first American university to proactively resist Trump’s attempts to limit free speech on campus.
Bolstering Galloway’s case: Trump’s approval ratings are in the gutter.
CNN polling shows his approval rating at 41%, the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days, dating back at least 70 years. Just 22% of Americans strongly approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, a new low. And he is underwater on nearly all major issues he campaigned on — particularly the economy and immigration.
“Standing up to the administration’s policies may be painful in the short term,” Galloway writes. “But it presents an enormous opportunity over the longer term” for a major household brand. (Galloway’s pitch: Nike, which is in desperate need of a bold move, could “weaponize one of the great creative teams in consumer history” to showcase American values through the lens of sport.)
While there have been some resistance voices on Wall Street, few have mentioned Trump by name. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, a perennial doomsday prophet, sounded the alarm Tuesday in a winding X post that also promoted his new book. Trump-supporting financiers Ken Griffin and Bill Ackman have also openly whinged about the trade war’s threat to American supremacy on the world stage.
Those guys, with billions in their diversified portfolios, aren’t exactly the brand ambassadors you’d want for a unifying campaign against authoritarianism.
“From a pure brand perspective, the biggest commercial opportunity rests with the CEO of an iconic American brand,” Galloway says. “This is Nike, Walmart or Apple’s prize to lose … The advantage will erode sharply for the second and third CEOs who follow.”
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