What The Hell America!

Donald Trump embarked on a trade war with China expecting it might cause a recession that would throw Americans out of work, warning that it would cause “some pain” — despite public surveys showing Americans are afraid of what the tariffs would do to their personal finances, and even as they are already causing job losses and economic suffering for workers and farmers. None of it seemed to have any impact on the president’s decision-making.

But one group of Americans has had their concerns about the tariffs heard and attended to by the White House: CEOs and donors.

From the start of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout, Trump has paid attention, and sometimes wildly changed course on trade policy after listening, to a variety of Wall Street titans and corporate executives — even granting them special, private audiences to air out their concerns.

Take Trump’s first turnaround on the tariffs, which saw the president announce he was pausing his massive across-the-board tariffs for ninety days on all but China just a week after he put them in place. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s walkback came after having lunch with investor Charles Schwab and watching JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warning on Fox Business that the tariffs would cause a recession.

Meanwhile, the newspaper reported, his Treasury secretary Scott Bessent “was flooded with worried calls from Wall Street” that prompted him to persuade Trump to suspend the tariffs, while other unnamed “banking executives” pushed GOP lawmakers to warn him he would crash the economy.

Separately, venture capitalist and Trump donor Chamath Palihapitiya, who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee last year, raved in a recent interview about how responsive the Trump White House was to those who gave it money. Palihapitiya complained that despite being a “lifelong Democrat” and a megadonor to the Democratic Party, he “could never get a meeting,” had “never been to the Oval Office,” and could not “get a fucking phone call returned from the White House to save my life.” While he had dinner with Barack Obama once, it was solely because the former president wanted him to give money to his private foundation.

But the Trump administration, he said, was “totally different.”

“There’s not a single person there you can’t get on the phone and talk to,” he said, recounting how he was able to call Trump’s deputy chief of staff and arrange meetings at the White House with his friend and his wife, whose companies were both impacted by Trump’s tariffs, to hear about the on-the-ground effects of the tariffs.

“He’s like, instantly, ‘Put me on the phone,’” said Palihapitiya. “We were able to talk to all of them. They were like, ‘Explain the issue, I want to understand it. . . . You can pick up the phone and call, talk to these people. I’ve never had that experience.”

This policy where donors can simply call up and arrange a meeting with top White House officials to air their concerns about the tariffs seems to have driven Trump’s two most recent shifts on trade. Two days after six automotive industry groups signed on to a joint letter warning his tariffs could fatally jeopardize US vehicle production, the White House confirmed it was planning to exempt car parts from tariffs on Chinese imports.

Since then, multiple outlets have independently reported that Trump’s most recent climbdown on the trade war he launched against China — publicly conceding the tariffs would come down “substantially” — came following a private meeting with the CEOs of major retailers Walmart, Target, and Home Depot. According to the reports, Trump was particularly rattled by their warnings that if he didn’t change course, their shelves would soon be empty.

Later it came out that the Trump administration had fed Wall Street information about a trade deal with India that was close to being finalized, sparking accusations of insider trading. But it also showed that, for all the corporate grousing about Trump’s tariffs, the worlds of Wall Street and the C-suite were being kept in the loop and up to date about the president’s trade war in a way that ordinary Americans simply weren’t, with Trump having regularly met with a variety of executives before his “Liberation Day” to discuss the tariffs he had already put in place and those he was planning to implement.

Sadly, this is not unique to Trump. But it is a good, real-world case study of the argument made by the decade-old Princeton study that determined the United States is an oligarchy, where “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

All of the considerable anxiety and suffering of American families and laid-off workers, who do not have a platoon of well-funded lobbying groups or the ability to spontaneously phone up the White House and get a hearing for their concerns, had no impact on Trump’s decision-making on tariffs — it was only the worries and fears of business executives.

We can give the last word to the Wall Street Journal, which put it much more simply: “The only force that has reliably prompted him to back down is Wall Street.”