For all Trump’s success in winning back reluctant conservative billionaires,
many of them have seen firsthand the ways in which his erratic behavior
and anti-market ideas
could disrupt their businesses and the wider economy.

After Trump became President, he asked Schwarzman to enlist high-profile business executives to serve on an advisory council.

The participants included #Musk;
#Jamie #Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase;
#Mary #Barra, of General Motors;
#Bob #Iger, of Disney;
#Larry #Fink, of BlackRock;
and #Jack #Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric.

It was a perfect Trump setup:

the biggest brand names in American business would come to the White House,
kiss his ring,
and offer free advice.

But, as one of the panel’s members recalled,
the first session quickly devolved into an argument between Trump and several participants over his false allegation that China was manipulating its currency.

In the summer of 2017, following Trump’s comments about there being
“very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia,
the group convened an emergency call and decided to disband.

After Schwarzman conveyed the news to the White House, Trump preëmptively tweeted that he had decided to shut the group down.

Early this summer, Trump’s campaign surprised the Business Roundtable,
a members-only organization of corporate C.E.O.s,
with a last-minute acceptance for the ex-President to appear at the group’s quarterly meeting in Washington.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’ financial columnist and a host of “Squawk Box,” on CNBC,
reported that even C.E.O.s at the meeting who were sympathetic to Trump had found the former President uninformed and “remarkably meandering.”

A source in the room told me that Trump’s digressions included complaints about his court cases and “crazy rants about Venezuelan immigrants.”

Soon after the event, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld,
a professor at Yale University who tracks the political preferences of America’s corporate leaders,
wrote in an op-ed for the Times that not a single Fortune 100 C.E.O. had donated to Trump by June of this year,
something he called a “telling data point.”

In fact, Sonnenfeld argued, the lack of giving to Trump from traditional Republican donors in the business community was the real fund-raising story,
“a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican Presidential candidates dating back over a century.”

Sonnenfeld told me that such giving “fell off a cliff” when Trump became the Party’s nominee
—going from more than a quarter of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s in 2012,
when Mitt Romney was the G.O.P. candidate,
to zero in 2016.

In 2020, he noted, only two Fortune 100 C.E.O.s had given to Trump
—someone in the energy sector who is no longer running his company
and #Safra #Catz, the C.E.O. of the Oracle software corporation.

One lobbyist who speaks with many corporate C.E.O.s told me,
“Unanimously, they hate the Biden Administration’s policies.
But I think almost unanimously they would much rather deal with that than the risk of catastrophic disaster from a Trump Administration.”

By fall, the only Business Roundtable member publicly backing Trump was Schwarzman.