'Basic betrayal': CEOs terrified of Trump retaliation won’t speak out against policies

President Donald Trump's so-called American oligarchs—the 1 percent CEO class who voted for him for tax cuts and deregulation—are complaining about getting nothing of the sort and, instead, being on the receiving end of "highly personalized government control," according to The New Republic.

In off-the-record conversations facilitated by The Yale School of Management's Jerry Sonnenfeld, chief executive officers say this isn't what they signed up for when they voted for Trump.

"They claim Trump’s “state-driven capitalism”—which I think is more accurately termed fascist corporatism—offends their sense of patriotism, what they really seem to resent is having routinely to pay Trump tribute, either by enriching him personally or by helping him try to plug the $3 trillion revenue hole he created with his idiot Big Beautiful Bill," writes TNR's Timothy Noah.

These CEOs, who have also privately expressed alarm over the erosion of democracy, want their money back, but it's looking like there are no refunds just yet—only tariffs.

About those tariffs, seventy-one percent of CEOs say they are killing their businesses, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, and three quarters of them agreed that tariffs are illegal. That same seventy-one percent also agreed that Trump has decimated the independence of the Federal Reserve.

"This is government by shakedown, and they are the mark. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch," Noah quips.

But what really burns CEOs most, according to an article Sonnefeld co-wrote with Yale colleague Stephen Henriques in Fortune, is Trump's dipping into the coffers of companies like Intel and Nvidia.

"The Trump administration’s drift toward a quasi-socialist statism, seizing ownership from private shareholders, dictating staffing, and selectively blocking moves into strategic markets based upon politics and kickbacks," they said.

Between Trump's hawking of H-1B Visas at a hefty $100,000 per and his multi-million dollar gold card offering a fast-track to U.S. permanent residency for wealthy foreigners and corporations, "it's only gotten worse" for the CEOs, Noah says.

And then there are the government-built factories, that are allegedly being paid for by the $500 billion investment the administration required Japan to make in July, or what Noah deems as "Trump's factory scheme."

"That’s all well and good, but if Trump were sincerely interested in creating manufacturing jobs he wouldn’t be blocking at every turn the even larger sum allocated under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to create green technologies," Noah notes.

Trump's "turnstile on the TikTok sale," in which the alleged buyers could be a host of Trump supporters Larry Ellison, Jeff Yass, William Ford, and or Rupert Murdoch's family, in which the Trump administration expects to collect a fee that The Wall Street Journal says will be in the billions, and the World Liberty Financial deal with the United Arab Emirates in which the" money goes not to the Treasury but to Trump himself, making this the biggest bribery scandal since Teapot Dome," writes Noah, are two more catalysts to CEOs' ire.

The Commerce Department considering imposing an annual tax of up to five percent of a patent’s assessed value on top of the fees already charged for a patent, which can run up to $10,000, is not what Trump promised, either.

"This is different from a Trump proposal to reserve for the United States government some of the proceeds from university patents," Noah explains.

Lastly, the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger, approved by Trump on the condition that the government acquired, free of charge, a “golden share” allowing it to veto certain actions by the new company that affect workers, is yet another match to the oligarchs' fire.

"They struck a bad bargain by allowing Trump to replace the rule of law and the interaction of multiple branches of government with crude and not-always-legal Trump shakedown," Noah says.

"It may take Jerry Sonnenfeld’s CEOs some time to fathom precisely how foolish they were to get behind Trump, but I predict that before this is over, they’ll be asking America why on earth we ever put their guy in the White House."