Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, director of the Yale University Chief Executive Leadership Institute, cast doubt on Republican claims that: Donald Trump He is regaining the support of the country's CEOs ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“That's far from the truth,” Sonnenfeld wrote in an essay published Sunday in The New York Times titled “We Know What the CEOs of America's Top Companies Really Think About Donald Trump.”
“They didn't flock to him before, and they're not flocking to him now,” he wrote. “Trump continues to suffer from the lowest levels of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.”
“The exceptions are prominent investors like Steve Schwarzman and David Sachs” who have endorsed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he argued.
Sonnenfeld said the “most telling data point about the lack of enthusiasm from American corporations” for Trump, who was convicted last month of 34 counts in a hush-money trial and also indicted on three other criminal counts, is that “not a single Fortune 100 CEO has donated money to the candidate so far this year.”
Citing Sonnenfeld's role leading the institute and his frequent contact with CEOs, he acknowledged that while CEOs may be wary of a second term for President Joe Biden, they also genuinely fear Trump reclaiming the White House.
“The chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic and believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the laws of masters,” he said.
But Sonnenfeld's analysis came in the wake of a series of large donations to Trump from billionaires, including $50 million from Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking family, and $10 million from Liz and Dick Uihlein.
The Trump campaign outraised the Biden campaign by more than $60 million in May 2024. Tens of millions of dollars were donated after the hush money conviction, and the campaign received $141 million.
You can read Sonnenfeld's full Times essay here.
