44 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
Nation
By the 1970s, pollution and price-fixing scan-
dals had tanked Big Business’s image. A few CEOs
decided to break with the conservative politics of
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National
Association of Manufacturers and came together
to found the BRT. But the succeeding generation,
in Sonnenfeld’s view, didn’t live up to the BRT’s
original promise of civic virtue, focusing instead
on attacking government interference and avoiding
taxation. “It wasn’t that we had a few bad apples,”
Sonnenfeld says. “There’s something wrong with
the whole orchard in that period.”
The tech bust, corporate scandals such as Enron
and the 2008 financial crisis pushed Americans’ es-
teem of business to historic lows. When the Obama
Administration tried to get health care companies
on board with the Affordable Care Act, not a single
member of the industry came to the table. “They
were like little kids throwing stones and hiding in
the hedges,” Sonnenfeld says. “The business com-
munity was not trying to solve problems.”
But over the past decade, Sonnenfeld believes,
a new generation of leaders has stepped into the
public sphere to do well by doing good. In 2015,
opposition from corporations like Eli Lilly and An-
them helped kill a proposed Indiana state law that
would have allowed businesses to refuse to serve
gay people. The following year, American Airlines,
Microsoft and GE were among the companiesCEOs of Lockheed and Boeing, saying, ‘Wait, he’s
trying, over chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, to get
a fight going between us over the cost of a fighter
jet,’ ” Sonnenfeld recalls. It was the same with
Ford vs. GM, Pfizer vs. Merck.
Sonnenfeld realized Trump was repeating the
tactics from The Apprentice, the same zero-sum
mentality that had buoyed him to political suc-
cess: divide and conquer. “Trump’s whole modus
operandi, his one trick his whole life, is to break
collective action,” Sonnenfeld says. “The whole
NAFTA battle was pitting Canada against Mex-
ico. He constantly tried to divide France and Ger-
many, the U.K. vs. the E.U., Russia vs. China. He
tried to build up Bernie vs. Hillary, just like he did
with the Republican primary candidates. As pa-
thetically puerile a device as it is, with the GOP it
worked magnificently well.”
But business leaders, unlike the Republicans,
banded together to resist. In August 2017, when
Trump opined that there were “very fine people
on both sides” of the deadly white- supremacist
march in Charlottesville, Va., Merck CEO Kenneth
Frazier, who is Black, announced that he would
step down from Trump’s American Manufactur-
ing Council. Others—some prodded by Sonnenfeld behind the scenes—
quickly followed. Within a few days, that council, along with another
business advisory group, had disbanded. It was, Sonnenfeld says, the
first time in history that the business community turned its back on a
President’s call to service.
“He lost the business community in Charlottesville,” says Matthias
Berninger, who heads public affairs for Bayer. “Ken leaving his council,
that was the starting point of everything that followed.” Deregulatory ac-
tions Trump expected Big Business to appreciate were rebuffed: oil and
gas companies publicly opposed his repeal of methane regulations, and
many utilities shrugged off his rollback of CO₂ limits. The auto industry
united against Trump’s attempt to eliminate mileage standards, only to
be investigated by the Department of Justice.
Trump’s antagonism to immigration and free trade ran counter to busi-
ness’s interests, says the D.C. corporate fixer and former GOP strategist
Juleanna Glover. “Many corporations and CEOs had an abiding fear of being
attacked in a Trump tweet, so staying out of Washington was a good risk-
mitigation strategy,” she says. “The Republicans have largely abandoned
their pro-business values, and it’s hard to negotiate in good faith when
one of the parties is seen as continuing to undermine democratic values.”
Trump may have been the catalyst. But the recent shift of the cor-
porate class is only the latest in the long history of Big Business’s dance
with Washington.
While many remember the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same
era produced a generation of innovative entrepreneurs (Thomas Edison,
Luther Burbank) who were folk heroes. “The business leaders of the early
to mid-1900s were the original ‘progressives,’ ” Sonnenfeld says. “They
were for infrastructure, sustainability, safe workplaces, urban beautifica-
tion, immigration.” Midcentury CEOs saw themselves as patriotic indus-
trialists, allies of government and builders of society. During the World
Wars, they famously answered the call to contribute. Republican Presi-
dent Dwight Eisenhower appointed three sitting CEOs to his Cabinet.