In five recent conversations, the answers have been remarkably similar: This president is pro-business, and that’s a refreshing change from the last administration. “It feels like he wants us to win,” one CEO remarked.
That was apparent in Davos, where the president gathered dozens of top CEOs after his address on Wednesday evening for a multi-hour dinner and power-networking session. And you can’t deny that America’s economy (in part due to the AI race) has been surging, with markets up and GDP growth blowing past expectations to hit 4.4% in Q3 of last year.
That doesn’t mean CEOs all like the president’s tactics or rhetoric (one executive told me he tells CEOs to pretend it’s a “silent movie”). But the overall strategy may prove correct—that the American government can benefit from more businesslike thinking and private-public partnership.
The United States is the capital of capitalism, with the world’s top innovators and yes, the most and wealthiest billionaires as a result. Meanwhile, we have a national debt that has ballooned, a devastating wealth divide, and a looming AI wave that threatens to wipe out lower-paid jobs first.
If you think of the U.S. as a business that needed a financial overhaul, what would a turnaround CEO do? They’d throw out the old playbook, size up the operation, ditch inefficiencies, place new bets, and move as fast as possible to right the ship, paying no mind to detractors.
The CEO-president is an experiment we are all witnessing firsthand, as Trump pushes boundaries, including legal ones; tests new revenue streams (tariffs); pushes for equity stakes in place of government subsidies; and drives his agenda aggressively forward in a move-fast, make-or-break-America approach, outcome TBD.
There’s also the question of where the line is between what’s good for America, what’s good for business, and what’s good for the president himself, with sometimes murky overlap.
