Successful businessman. Savvy negotiator. Top dealmaker. This is how Donald Trump presented his qualifications for president even before he declared his candidacy two years ago. He spent years laying the groundwork for his candidacy as the political “outsider” whose deep understanding of the business world would uniquely qualify him to be the leader of the free world.
“We don’t always think of our presidents as jobs and business negotiators, but they are. Presidents are our dealmakers in chief,” he tweeted in 2012.
Trump campaigned on parlaying that supposed business savvy into running the government itself. “Under budget and ahead of schedule,” he boasted, just weeks before Election Day, at the opening of his Washington, D.C. hotel. “Today is a metaphor for what we can accomplish for this country.”
But this posture has been undermined early in Trump’s presidency by an unlikely culprit: His announcement last week that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris Climate Agreement on climate change. In what must be a surprise to Trump loyalists, one of the most celebrated policy moves thus far in his presidency is running headlong into a remarkable conflict with the business world.
It turns out Trump is not running the government like a business. He’s running it as a sop to his “anti-globalist” base and anti-regulation zealots in the Republican Party. While GOP presidents are typically pro-business, the business world is precisely the constituency that sees right through Trump’s charade, and thinks he has climate change all wrong. Trump’s Paris withdrawal announcement has landed with a thud with leaders who run businesses of their own. Worse for Trump, they aren’t staying silent about it.
In a new push on this front, today a number of businesses and investors, in coalition with governors, mayors, and major colleges and universities, launched We Are Still In, a campaign that declares their intention to remain within the carbon emission-reducing framework of the Paris agreement, despite a failure of leadership by the federal government. The signers of the statement call Trump’s decision “a grave mistake that endangers the American public and hurts America’s economic security and diplomatic reputation.”
The list of signatories includes businesses large and small, including powerhouses like eBay and Nike, to smaller companies as diverse as wineries, farms, ski resorts, and Catholic health care providers.
The business pushback against the dealmaker-in-chief was falling into even place before Trump made the withdrawal from the Paris accord official last Thursday. Hours before Trump made his announcement in the Rose Garden, CEOs of 25 top U.S. companies — including Google, Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and many others — made a last minute effort to convince him to change his mind. The CEOs ran full pages ads imploring Trump to remain in the deal, for the sake of American businesses and their employees (and their jobs). Remaining in the pact would, they argued, make U.S. businesses more stable, more competitive, and less vulnerable to risks created by climate change.
The same group had made this same plea directly to Trump in April, to no avail. Even the CEOs of fossil fuel giants Exxon Mobil and Conoco urged Trump to remain in the pact.
Trump, though, appears determined to be out of step with the business community’s needs on this issue. Trump seems to savor disruption, uncertainty, and disarray — and this goes beyond the Paris withdrawal, to include the entire tenor of how he manages his White House staffing, his belligerent relationship with other branches of government, and his chaotic communications with the media and the public. But business craves stability, not chaos. As The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein shows, the stability that remaining in the pact, and avoiding disruptions to Obama-era initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, are what many segments of the business world hope for. Trump’s “whiplash-inducing reversal is exposing all of these industries to what their executives and investors fear most: uncertainty,” Brownstein writes.
Yet, in an odd turn of events, Trump is justifying his flouting of what business leaders are telling him they need by touting his own supposed deal-making prowess — he’s promising to make a new deal that will be more favorable to the United States.
But the idea that Trump will renegotiate a more favorable deal is nonsense. As the Washington Post’s fact checkers pointed out, “Each country set its own commitments under the Paris Accord,” rendering Trump’s vow of a better deal “puzzling.” Although he could change commitments made by Obama for carbon emissions reduction, they continue, “there is no appetite to renegotiate the entire agreement, as made clear by various statements from world leaders after his announcement.”
It’s hard to say at this point how much damage Trump’s withdrawal will do to the future prospects of the Paris climate deal. But the We Are Still In coalition is making it clear that there are plenty of other actors who are willing to step up and try to signal to the rest of the world that we still hope to move in the right direction. “It is imperative that the world know that in the U.S., the actors that will provide the leadership necessary to meet our Paris commitment are found in city halls, state capitals, colleges and universities, investors and businesses,” the We Are Still In signers write.
The message of this coalition to Trump: Your refusal to lead on climate change will not Make America Great Again. But if you won’t help put us on track to a lower carbon future, the rest of us will have to do it without you.