… On the one hand, Trump is giving the business community virtually everything it wants on many of its key policy priorities. His tax bill slashed corporate taxes. Federal agencies are systematically rolling back financial, consumer-protection, and environmental regulations. While Trump is pursuing some policies that many businesses oppose—particularly the moves to restrict immigration and raise trade barriers that are central to his insular nationalism—generally he has aligned with corporate preferences as unreservedly as any president since at least Ronald Reagan (if not Calvin Coolidge).
For business, though, the price for those wins is accepting a president committed to publicly stoning companies and individual corporate leaders who cross him. Trump’s message seems to be that businesses that play ball will be rewarded and those that don’t will be punished. That’s a political logic familiar in strong-man governments that run the spectrum from old urban machines like Richard Daley’s Chicago on one end to autocracies like Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the other. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic