# Corporate Silence Amidst Political Volatility

**Podcast:** The Indicator from Planet Money
**Published:** 2026-01-28

## Transcript

NPR.
President Trump has spent his first year back in office blurring the lines between business and government and creating a lot of headaches for business leaders.
His trade war and his immigration policies are adding costs.
He's demanding a government cut of some of NVIDIA's sales in China and an outright government stake in Intel.
He wants to cap how much interest credit card companies charge their customers, and how much defense companies pay their CEOs.
We just did an episode on that.
He's also being kind of a bully about everything.
Last week he even sued JP Morgan Chase and its powerful chief executive, Jamie Diamond.
But as the president goes storming through corporate America, business leaders aren't exactly mounting a strong defense.
Billionaires and big tech CEOs are publicly competing to kiss Trump's ring.
Well, almost everyone else seems afraid to stand up for their companies.
Also not a billionaire.
Maria, you have spent the last year covering how corporate America has responded to President Trump's extremely, let's say, disruptive second term.
Yes, I have.
Today on the show, as Trump rewrites the rules of doing business, why aren't business leaders doing more to speak up?
This has been a pretty eventful month for corporate America, even by the standards of Trump's second term.
It started with the U.S.
attack on Venezuela, and Trump pressuring U.S.
oil companies to invest there, and then sniping at Exxon Mobil after its CEO called the country uninvestable.
Then last week, Trump went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
He threw a private reception there for CEOs.
But he pointedly left some big names off the invite list.
And there were no chairs.
But more recently, something seems to have soured between the two men.
Diamond has continued saying that the Federal Reserve should stay independent at a time when Trump is trying to take control of the central bank.
Trump has also proposed putting that cap on credit card interest rates, which would hurt JP Morgan Chase's business.
At Davos last week, Diamond said this.
It would be an economic disaster.
I think it's wrong to for the government to get involved extensively in pricing of stuff, but you know, I gotta deal with the world I got.
A day later, Trump hit JP Morgan Chase and Jamie Diamond personally with a lawsuit seeking five billion dollars in damages.
The lawsuit was ostensibly about some of his long simmering grievances against JP Morgan Chase and several other banks.
Trump claims that these banks closed his accounts after the January 6th riots by his supporters in 2021 because the banks didn't like his politics.
But Trump has been complaining about this for years.
He only filed the lawsuit after Jamie Diamond called one of his newer proposals an economic disaster, and that the bank doesn't close accounts for political or religious reasons.
The bank declined to comment on Diamond's relationship with Trump.
Meanwhile, the White House declined to comment on Trump's relationship with Diamond.
Oh, all of a sudden no one has anything to say.
Now, JP Morgan Chase is the biggest bank in the country, and Diamond's been running it for two decades.
They should be just fine.
But if this is an example of the cost of speaking out against Trump, a lot of other companies and CEOs are choosing the path of least resistance.
You don't want to say anything unless it's like clearly exactly in your core interests in your core business and at no risk.
That's Daniela Bellew Ayres.
She's an entrepreneur and consultant who worked in the Obama administration.
Now she runs the Leadership Now project, a coalition of business leaders.
In October, her group and the Harris polls surveyed business leaders across the political spectrum.
They found that 84% are worried about how the current political and legal climate will affect their businesses.
We're hearing this a lot from CEO surveys.
In private, executives are pretty worried.
In public, they don't want to talk about it.
What we have right now is a lot of personalized decision making, chaotic decision making, instability that we're seeing the cost of.
That said, from a business perspective, the past year has had some chaos for corporate America.
Profits are up, the stock market is up, and Trump's tax and spending law will largely benefit businesses.
So in the short term, business leaders do have some reason to be happy, as long as Trump isn't paying too much attention to their industry.
In the sectors where Trump is paying a lot of attention, some CEOs are going out of their way to court him.
Take the big tech companies that are giving him fancy golden gifts and donating to his ballroom, or showing up to a private White House screening of First Lady Melania Trump's new documentary.
As indicator listeners know, this has some political commentators, including Daniela, ringing the alarm bell over crony capitalism.
That's a corrupt system in which businesses rise and fall based on how much a political leader likes them.
Some American business leaders have been, from our perspective, naive about where that type of engagement with government can ultimately go.
In the most extreme cases of crony capitalism, it doesn't go anywhere good for the broader economy or for individual business leaders who ultimately fall out of favor.
I talked about some of this with the White House official who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity, and who largely dismiss claims of crony capitalism.
The official calls Trump's policies, by and large, the traditional free market policy making that you would expect coming out of a Republican administration.
Some of what's going on with business leaders is about more than Trump.
Even before he was re-elected, companies wanted to be talking less about politics in public.
That is probably a pretty futile hope, as we are seeing in Minnesota right now.
Big companies have mostly tried to avoid weighing in on the federal government's violent immigration crackdown.
But then federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretdy in Minneapolis this weekend.
Now Minnesota CEOs have put out a very carefully worded letter calling for, quote, an immediate de-escalation of tensions.
This won't be the last time that business leaders will be expected to wield their power during Trump's presidency.
Right now, they're mostly focused on the costs of speaking up.
But there are also long term costs to staying silent.
This episode was produced by Angel Correras with engineering by Robert Rodriguez.
It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie.
Kate King Cannon is our show's editor, and the indicator is a production of NPR.