US President Donald Trump gestures as Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan (left) speaks during a meeting with banking leaders to discuss how the financial services industry is meeting the needs of those affected by COVID-19, at the White House in Washington, DC Customers can meet March 11, 2020.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump will address some of the world’s most powerful corporate leaders on Thursday, albeit with some notable absences.
In addition to Trump, President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients will also speak to the CEOs in Biden’s place as the president is in Italy for the G7 meeting.
A spokeswoman for the Business Roundtable said she expects “approximately” 100 of the more than 200 chief executives who are part of the exclusive forum to attend Thursday’s quarterly meeting in Washington, a turnout rate she described as typical.
CNBC reached out to each of the more than 200 companies whose chief executives are listed online as members of the Business Roundtable and asked whether they plan to attend Thursday’s meeting.
Only 17 wanted to confirm whether the company’s CEO was present or not. The rest – more than 180 companies – did not respond to emails for several days.
So here’s what we know: Of the 17 company spokespeople who responded to CNBC, four said their CEOs planned to attend: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro.
Another 13 said their CEOs wouldn’t see Trump and Zients speak.
Black stone Group CEO and Trump ally Steve Schwarzman, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Steel case CEO Sara Armbruster, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, delta Ed Bastian, CEO of Air Lines, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick and the company’s chairman, James Gorman, and Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good is among those who will be absent from the conference, according to company officials.
Some of them, like Armbruster, Good and Solomon, are not participating due to scheduling conflicts and travel. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Microsoft For example, CEO Satya Nadella will reportedly be present at the G7 summit in Italy.
Representatives for Woods and Bastian did not respond to questions about why their chief executives would not attend the meeting. Representatives for Fink and Nadella did not respond to requests for comment.
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The meeting’s list of attendees could read like a list of which CEOs are willing to travel to Washington to hear from Trump – and which are not – just weeks after his conviction in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s comments to the group could also offer a split-screen comparison to what Biden said in his speech to CEOs at a March 2022 Business Roundtable meeting he attended.
As the president runs for re-election, Biden is leaning on his administration’s track record of aggressive antitrust enforcement and blanket bans on so-called junk fees that companies charge for services that cost the company nothing.
Those policies have drawn the ire of some business leaders and led them to look forward to a second Trump administration and the regulatory loosening that would come with it.
Behind closed doors, however, Biden has made his own efforts to woo corporate America. The president has met regularly with CEOs and industry leaders to discuss the U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic and global standing.
Kevin McCarthy, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives from California, said the willingness of busy CEOs to travel to Washington for a face-to-face meeting with Trump was a result of the close presidential race.
“I find [CEOs] Look what everyone else sees, that he’s going to win,” McCarthy said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
For some of the CEOs planning to attend Thursday, the decision to be there represents a change in their stance toward the former president. After the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, several top managers broke sharply with Trump, publicly or privately.
Last year, Dimon told attendees at the New York Times’ DealBook conference to “help” Trump’s rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, win her primary campaign against Trump.
If Haley did well, Dimon said, voters might have “a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump.” The former president responded by sharply criticizing Dimon on social media, calling him an “overrated globalist.”
But just two months later, Dimon had changed his mind.
“Take a step back, be honest. [Trump] I was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He made the economy grow quite well. The trade tax reform worked. “He was right about some aspects of China,” Dimon said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Trump has laid out a second-term economic agenda that many economists believe could fuel inflation again – a dreaded prospect for investors and consumers who have spent the past year eagerly waiting for the Federal Reserve to act on cooling inflation interest rate cuts responded.
The former president has also proposed extending his first term’s tax cuts beyond their 2025 expiration date and imposing draconian tariffs on imports across the board, particularly those from China.
In his Davos speech, Dimon suggested that his willingness to defend some of Trump’s policies was at least partly to avoid a scenario in which either he or JPMorgan Chase ended up on the bad side of a notoriously vindictive Trump.
“I have to be prepared for both [Trump and Biden to win]”, he said. “I’ll be prepared for both. We’ll take care of both.”
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2024-06-12 20:54:55
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