With Donald Trump’s political stock suddenly reaching new highs—after he survived an assassination attempt and starred in a slickly produced convention, while President Biden stays at home with Covid, all in one week—business leaders must revisit their scenarios for a Trump presidency. They should keep three factors front and center:
Trump’s stance on taxes and regulation
Trump won’t be able to repeat fully the big win he delivered to business in his previous term. Candidate Trump made two promises to American business in 2016, and in office he made good on both: to cut business taxes and to tamp down regulatory zeal. He’s making those same two promises now, but today’s environment is starkly different.
In his first year as President, Congress passed and he signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a historic overhaul of personal and business taxes. Notably, it slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Trump’s problem is that he can’t promise a cut remotely near that deep again because it would reduce corporate tax revenue to a trickle. He has said he would cut the rate from 21% to 20%, but companies would scarcely notice the difference, and in any case, Congress would need to agree. He couldn’t count on that. While Republicans held the Senate and House in 2017 and 2018, Democrats now hold the Senate, and even some recent polls showing a Trump victory also show strong support for Democratic Senate candidates.
By contrast, delivering on his second promise, to rein in the regulators, would be almost entirely within his power because the main regulatory bodies are in the executive branch. Business leaders could expect a raft of regulatory executive orders on inauguration day or soon after, just as last time. Former Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris told Fortune in 2019, “The attitude shift was palpable.”
Trump’s positions on trade and immigration
Interestingly, Trump seems most strongly committed to policies that business leaders liked least in his previous term. Those policies affect trade and immigration. Early in 2018 Trump launched his grand-scale trade war, waged mostly against China but also targeting Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, India, Mexico, and South Korea, most of which responded with retaliatory tariffs. CEOs hated it. In September 2019, a Conference Board survey revealed a vertiginous drop in CEO confidence. An open-ended question asked what worried them most. Their No. 1 answer: tariffs and trade wars.
Trump says he would be even more aggressive this time around. In his previous term he put tariffs as high as 25% on certain Chinese products. Now he proposes a 60% tariff on all imports from China plus a 10% tariff on all imports from anywhere. The result would be a level of U.S. protectionism not reached since the Great Depression under the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.
Business leaders similarly loathed Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Silicon Valley wanted PhD’s from around the world. Farmers and construction companies suffered without immigrants. Now he promises the “largest deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history.” Such declarations frighten potential immigrants, including legal ones.
Trump likes unpredictability—business hates it
He will almost certainly remain highly unpredictable, which he considers a major strength. In his 2006 book Crippled America, Trump wrote, “I don’t want people to know exactly what I’m doing—or thinking. I like being unpredictable. It keeps them off balance.” As President, he often reversed positions abruptly. NATO was obsolete, then wasn’t. China was a currency manipulator, then wasn’t. The Export-Import Bank was useless, then valuable. Such nonstop whipsawing is a serious problem for businesspeople trying to make plans and develop strategies.
The stakes for business are always high in a presidential election. For that reason, it’s well worth the necessary time and effort for businesspeople to create multiple detailed scenarios—who is President, which party controls Congress, what is the state of the economy—and assign probabilities to each one. Then list the company’s detailed responses to each. The model for such an exercise is what the investment management company Pimco did in the 2008 financial crisis, just before what came to be known as Lehman Weekend. Pimco’s leaders thought there was only a 5% chance that Lehman Brothers would fail over the weekend and not be rescued by the government or bought by another company—but that’s what happened. While other Wall Street firms scrambled, Pimco employees knew what to do on Monday morning and came through the tumult largely unscathed.
That’s the kind of preparation that will pay off richly if America elects a proudly unpredictable President.
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