The people sucking up to Trump

While Trump and his henchmen are stripping Americans of our constitutional rights and illegally taking over other nations, America’s supposed leadership class is silent. Or worse, they’re helping Trump.

Too many university presidents are silent or caving to Trump’s demands. Too many senior managers of law firms have surrendered to his tyranny. Too many directors of large nonprofits are remaining silent. Almost all Republican leaders are rubber stamping his authoritarianism. Too many Democratic leaders are barely putting up a fight.

The worst offenders are the CEOs of some of America’s most powerful and influential corporations.

Some stood up with the rest of America against Trump when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they’re silent about what Trump is doing to our democracy and international law. Or they’re actively enabling him in order to protect and pad their bottom lines.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently said that he “fully supports” Trump and would welcome National Guard troops in San Francisco. (He later walked back his comments on the National Guard but continues to back Trump.)

Follow the money: Salesforce’s biggest customer is the federal government. Trump has shown how eager he is to use federal contracts to reward his friends — and Benioff doesn’t want to anger him.

Benioff is also seeking even more massive federal contracts to help ICE hire thousands of agents at a time when ICE is disappearing people off the streets and violating due process.

Or look at Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who recently gave Trump a plaque with a 24-karat golden base and then showered him with praise at a convening of Big Tech billionaires at the White House.

Apple followed up by removing an ICE tracking app from its app store at the request of Trump’s Department of Justice.

Why would Cook suck up to Trump? Because Trump has given Apple special exemptions from his tariffs. And of course, both Cook and Apple benefit substantially from Trump’s latest round of tax cuts.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Zuckerberg has ended Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking policies, parroting Trump’s claims that the practice censored conservative views. And Meta shelled out $25 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit claiming the company censored him when it removed his accounts. Facebook has also removed an ICE tracking page.

Why? Meta is investing billions in AI and the power-hungry data centers that fuel it, and the company needs a friendly White House to ramp up development.

And whatever happened to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the United States, who relishes his position as “spokesman” of the American business community? What has he said about Trump’s lawlessness?

He’s nowhere. He’s said nothing.

In October, Dimon and JPMorgan announced what they called the Security and Resiliency Initiative, with the bank pledging $1.5 trillion to “facilitate, finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency.”

Pure fluff and corporate PR — a repackaged set of aspirations. Just like Dimon and his bank’s $2.5 trillion Sustainable Development Target, unveiled with much self-gratulation in 2021 — a package of hoped-for environmentally related investments that, as The Wall Street Journal recently noted, “the bank doesn’t talk about that much anymore.”

Dimon also used to talk about the wide-ranging benefits of diversity and inclusion. No longer. His bank basks in Trump’s good graces — and the tax cuts and financial regulatory rollbacks that accompany them.

You see the pattern.

Benioff, Cook, Zuckerberg, Dimon, and all the other billionaires and CEOs selling out to Trump are happy to back his anti-democracy agenda as long as their businesses keep raking it in.

They get tax cuts, federal contracts, and deregulation, and Trump gets to trample on our fundamental rights and on the basic tenets of international law with no pushback from America’s so-called “leaders.”

They’re showing us a reality we should have known years ago, but many of us didn’t want to see: America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides. It enables. It sucks up.

If they were true leaders, they’d speak out and speak up against Trump. But they won’t and don’t. They go along with Trump’s authoritarian agenda so they can enlarge their wealth and power.

How do we fix this?

Courageous politicians would call out this ugly alliance between the so-called “leadership class” and Trump’s anti-democracy agenda.

But too many politicians eagerly take money from billionaires and big corporations to keep winning elections. Yet what’s the point of winning if they’re in the pockets of the powerful?

We must support only politicians who swear off big money and fight for the people who don’t have power.

Some politicians are already doing this, but too few.

What else can we do to fix this?

We don’t have to wait around for politicians or other formal leaders to grow spines. We can be that spine.

You can run for office.

Even if you don’t hold a formal office or have official authority, you can still organize your community, your workplace, or your campus.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and countless others who have moved the world held no official authority or formal position of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others to fight back.

At a time in our nation’s history when America desperately needs leaders but too many official leaders are intimidated or have been bought off — it’s up to the rest of us to step up.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.