The business world is now starting to speak out against President Donald Trump’s hostile attitude toward CEOs who don’t do what he likes.
That’s according to a Thursday article in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Trump’s latest threat against Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan prompted a strong reaction from several corporate executives. In a Truth Social post this week, Trump demanded Tan “resign immediately” from the company or that Intel’s board fire Tan due to his investments in Chinese semiconductor firms, saying there was “no other solution to this problem.” Bill George, who is the former CEO of medical device company Medtronic, told the Journal: “It’s wrong for the president of the United States to be telling a major corporation’s board to fire their chief executive.” He added that unless Tan broke the law, he had no reason to resign from the company.
“This is certainly not an approach the United States has seen in modern American politics,” Hofstra University’s Meena Bose told the paper. “It’s government bending economic interests.”
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Following Trump’s threat against Tan, semiconductor analyst Ray Wang warned that executives with ties to China should expect to receive similar threats from the president, calling it “the new normal.” And Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the outlet that Trump’s rhetoric has struck a nerve with the business community.
“It’s just a frightening process to have the military commander of the U.S. pick and choose who’s to lead private companies,” Sonnenfeld told the Journal.
According to the paper, the new threats against Intel’s CEO have caught other business leaders off guard, who were reportedly focused on “public flattery and splashy U.S. investment announcements” as a means of staying in the administration’s good graces. Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, presented Trump with a gold-plated bauble at the White House this week, with Trump promising to exempt Apple from his latest tariffs. In response to the threat against Tan, Laffer Tengler Investments CEO Nancy Tengler told the Journal that she was “really uncomfortable with this kind of activity.”
“This is, I think, not the purview of the president,” she said.
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Click here to read the Wall Street Journal’s report in its entirety (subscription required).