Tom C W Lin. The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change. Berrett-Koehler, 2022.
The president ranted and raved. He was paranoid about a cabal of big media conglomerates, the political establishment, and his aides conspiring against him. He was working with the Russian leadership to tear down traditional American alliances in Europe. He had ideas about using the FBI and the full resources of the federal government to go after his perceived enemies. Our legislative and judicial branches struggled to rein in the most powerful man in the world.
This is not a summary of a recent presidential administration. Rather, it is the plot of a best-selling 1965 novel, Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel. The book was reissued in 2018 as political pundits noted its frightening echoes of the Trump administration. The reissued edition had a cover with a simple, ominous question, “What would happen if the president of the U.S.A. went stark raving mad?”
During the Trump campaign and administration spanning over four years, much of the United States went mad. Norms of American politics and common decency were breached. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Name calling and bullying tactics of bad schoolyards became common in the august halls of high office. Perennial dark voices and misguided views that had been dwindling and pushed to the fringes of society by decades of progress found daylight once again. Truth and facts melted from solid into air. Science and data gave way to conspiracies and fiction. Perhaps most distressing during this period was the seeming lack of serious and strong restraints on then president Trump—the lack of checks and willingness to speak truth to power.
The founders of the American system established a system of checks and balances among three branches of government with separated powers, whereby no single person or branch would be dominant. The founders recognized that flawed, self-interested human beings could misuse and abuse their power once in high office, so they designed a system that leverages the flaws and ambitions of humans to serve as protective mechanisms against abuse. As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Unfortunately, partisan politics and personal ambitions largely thwarted the plans of the founders, particularly in the last few decades. Instead of the executive and legislative branches working to check and balance one another’s worst impulses, they now work in concert when they are controlled by the same party and in obstruction when they are controlled by different parties. The judiciary has also grown more partisan as judicial appointments, particularly on the federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court, are either confirmed or rejected based largely along partisan lines.
Instead of a separation of powers, we have a “separation of parties.”
This separation of parties has meant that the parties distanced themselves from one another toward their extremes. Cooperation across the aisle was punished within party ranks and by voters in an increasingly polarized country fragmented by gerrymandered districts. Obstruction was rewarded with greater party support (read: money) and re-election. This has created vicious cycles of polarization. As Ezra Klein observed in his definitive tome on polarization in the United States, Why We’re Polarized:
Institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on. Polarization isn’t something that happened to American politics. It’s something that’s happening to American politics. And it’s getting worse.
As the parties became more polarized, the country was left in the abyss, as short-term issues and longer-term systemic problems festered despite the existence of common sense, widely agreed-upon solutions. In recent years, public approval of Congress has hovered around 15 percent, and public laws passed per session have been near all-time lows in the post-World War II period. This hyperpartisanship has led to dysfunction in the government, dissatisfaction in the electorate, and despair in the public.
On June 16, 2015, down a faux-gold escalator, businessman Donald Trump descended into this American political crucible of dysfunction and dissatisfaction and found an even lower level. Right from the start, during his presidential announcement speech, he disparaged Mexican immigrants and migrants as “people that have lots of problems” and “rapists” who are “bringing crime and drugs” into the country.
Initially, Trump was not taken seriously as a candidate by either the media or his opponents in the Republican primary field. They denounced, half-heartedly, his outlandish and offensive statements but figured he stood no chance of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. He attacked the media, mocked his opponents, and told half-truths and blatant falsehoods. His wild antics gave him more free media coverage with each passing day, and his support grew. As each primary opponent fell to the wayside in the face of his no-holds-barred, professional wrestling-style politics, he improbably won the party of Lincoln’s nomination in 2016, and went on to defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college to become the president of the United States.
It is one thing to denounce a presidential candidate; it is quite another thing to denounce the president, especially one with a loyal base of supporters. Rather than denounce and restrain him, the Republican Party saw him as an inelegant vehicle for their aspirations of lower taxes, less regulation, and conservative judges. They were willing to ride the tiger, if it took them to their desired destinations. As such, despite the built-in checks and balances of our system of government, there were little restraints on then president Trump.
In the absence of political restraints, activists went online and took to the streets in record numbers numerous times in response to the actions of the Trump administration. More remarkably, some of the most prominent capitalists from the biggest businesses around the country also joined in the activism as many CEOs spoke out against some of the administration’s policies. While President Trump ignored the calls of Speaker Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats, as his party stayed largely silent, the CEOs of corporate America got his attention, as he has long fashioned himself a fellow titan of industry.
In an era of unprecedented political dissatisfaction and dysfunction, people turned away from their political leaders and institutions and to businesses and business leaders to help them solve society’s most problematic policies and issues. In a 2021 study, a majority of those surveyed saw businesses as the only trusted, ethical, and competent institutions; and 86 percent of respondents expected CEOs to engage in social activism to address the challenges confronting society.
This new social activism from the corner office suites of corporate America did not always seem straightforward or comfortable, as the same companies denouncing some administration policies were also the ones lobbying the administration for lower taxes and less regulation. Nevertheless, this new form of corporate social activism that brought together activists on Main Street and capitalists on Wall Street found a louder and lasting voice during the four years of the Trump administration, from the Muslim ban at the beginning of the term to the failed insurrection that ended it.
The Muslim Ban
In December 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
In January 2017, about a week after coming into office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13,769, colloquially referred to as the “Trump travel ban,” which ostensibly made candidate Trump’s call for a Muslim ban official U.S. policy.
The executive order, formally titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” suspended the U.S. Refugees Admissions Program and banned entry into the country by people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It was revised by subsequent executive orders after numerous concerns were raised about the hastily drafted initial order. Supporters deemed it necessary for national security to ban citizens of these predominantly Muslim countries. Opponents deemed it a discriminatory “Muslim ban” that ran counter to core American values of tolerance, acceptance, and diversity, to say nothing of the nearly 3.5 million Muslim Americans that called America home.
Politically, little could be done to restrain the executive order. The Republican Party largely supported the executive action with public statements or silent complicity. The Democrats, with no control over Congress, had no meaningful political tools to stop it.
Shortly after Trump issued the executive order, in the absence of political means, opponents organized protests online, in the streets, and in the courts. Because the executive order was issued so hastily and without proper planning and coordination, thousands of Muslims, including citizens and permanent residents of the United States, were left stranded at airports across the country. Thousands gathered at airports around the country to protest and assist those who were detained because of the order. At the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a federal judge in New York granted a temporary injunction stalling the deportation of Muslims at U.S. airports who were impacted by the order. For its efforts, online donations poured into the ACLU, which garnered about $24 million in donations the weekend the order was signed, a sum greater than all of its donations in 2016.
While the protests happened in the streets, airports, and courts, activists also took the battles online. They waged social media campaigns against the ban immediately, and continued for months afterward. Hashtags like #NoBanNoWall, #Immigrants-Welcome, #RefugeesWelcome, and #NoMuslimBan trended across Twitter, then president’s Trump’s favorite medium of communication. Online boycott campaigns also targeted Trump-branded products and affiliated companies. Organizations like Grab Your Wallet posted a running tally of companies affiliated with Trump and his businesses. Furthermore, companies perceived as sympathetic to the ban also felt the power of this new high-tech form of social activism. Uber, for instance, was the target of the #DeleteUber campaign, as many saw the company as sympathetic to the Trump administration for providing service to certain airports despite other ride services suspending service in opposition to the ban.
In addition to the expected actions of activists, many major corporations and CEOs publicly spoke out and demonstrated against the ban in an unprecedented fashion. Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder, joined protests at San Francisco International Airport. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated that “Trump’s actions are hurting Netflix employees around the world, and are so un-American it pains us all. Worse, these actions will make America less safe (through hatred and loss of allies) rather than more safe.” Howard Schultz, then the CEO of Starbucks, wrote a letter to employees announcing plans to hire ten thousand refugees. More than one hundred leading tech firms, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google, jointly filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit against the order, and pledged millions of dollars to aid activists in the fight against the ban.
As a coda, in the summer of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the validity of one of the subsequently amended travel ban orders. However, this important initial episode involving the Trump Muslim ban foreshadowed the new vehicle of social change that is corporate social activism, as a check against the most powerful person in the world.
Charlottesville
On Sunday, April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, and thus formally brought the U.S. Civil War to an end. The surrender at Appomattox may have ended serious fighting between the Confederacy and the Union, but it did not end the fight for many sympathizers of the Confederacy.
On Friday, August 11, 2017, the modern heirs to the Confederacy congregated in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally to defend the honor of General Lee, or rather, the honor of a statue of Lee that it was proposed would be removed from a local park. White nationalists, neo-Nazis, neofascists, Klansmen, and right-wing militias gathered and marched through the bucolic University of Virginia campus carrying burning torches, assault weapons, the Confederate battle flag, the Nazi flag, and other emblems of hate. They chanted racist, anti-Semitic, and bigoted messages, like “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” and “White Lives Matter!” The fire from their torches paled in comparison to the heat from the hate in their eyes and faces. It was like a scene out of a dystopic alternate history film where many of the villains preferred costumes of khakis and polo shirts.
These hateful demonstrators did not have free rein on the streets of Charlottesville. They were met by counterprotestors, police, and media. The violent protests and confrontations became deadly on the second day, Saturday, August 12, when a white nationalist drove a car into a crowd, injuring some and killing Heather Heyer, a young woman peacefully protesting against hate in her community; two police officers near the scene died in a helicopter crash. Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and put an end to the hate-filled rally later that day.
In the days that followed, it took President Trump numerous attempts to issue a strong condemnation of the hate-filled posse of demonstrators. Initially, Trump spoke out against the violence and blamed “many sides” for the disturbance. There was much outcry after this statement, as many felt that Trump was suggesting a moral equivalence between the white nationalists and those protesting them. In subsequent statements, Trump said “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Again, on one side were neo-Nazis and Klansmen and on the other side were people protesting them, made up largely of faith-based organizations, Black Lives Matter, and other peaceful social activists.
Following his statements, the president was roundly condemned in the media. Politically, Democrats and a few Republicans like Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake forcefully condemned the president. Again, many in his party remained silent or tepid in their condemnation as the president continued to pay no political consequence for his hurtful statements.
While the activists and politicians were unable to get the president’s attention, one small group had more success—the CEOs of America’s largest companies. Executives, like the CEOs of Merck and Under Armour, publicly rebuked the president for his statements and resigned from various presidential advisory councils. Executives on the White House’s elite Strategic and Policy Forum, as well as those on the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, convened multiple calls that resulted in the executives resigning en masse from those two councils. These executives are some of the foremost business leaders in the world, representing companies like Pepsi, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, IBM, and Walmart. But before the executives could publicly announce their mass protest resignation, President Trump disbanded both councils—in a tweet.
To be sure, the actions of these corporate executives did not miraculously change Trump’s outlook or behavior, but they certainly got his attention and gave him some pause, because he understood the language of capital and commerce, if not of traditional politics and activism.
Separated Families and Caged Children
President Trump campaigned on a strong “America first” immigration policy. The execution of his immigration policies led to separated families and caged children.
In September 2017, President Trump announced plans to end the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, purportedly to protect Americans and American jobs from illegal immigrants. DACA allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children to remain and work in the country without the specter of deportation. At the time of the announcement, approximately eight hundred thousand young people were protected by DACA. These individuals were Americans in everything but documentation. They were raised here, educated here, worked here, and lived here as fully as any other American. Yet because of the termination of DACA, hundreds of thousands of people could be separated from their families and deported to a “homeland” that was completely foreign to them. And many were.
A few months after ending DACA, the Trump administration continued to push its hardline immigration policy. In early 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized entries into the United States from its Southern border. As part of the new policy, children who entered the country illegally would be separated from their parents or relatives and placed in cages in different holding facilities. Some of these children were so young that they were still in diapers.
The Trump administration saw the family separation and caging of children as an effective tool for deterring illegal immigration. This is despite the fact that many of these migrants were refugees looking for safe harbor in America after a long, perilous journey without adequate food or water. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said at the time, “They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.”
To make matters worse, the administration did not have an orderly process for reunifying the separated children from their families. As a result, hundreds of children would remain separated from their families and live years of their youth inside cages in a U.S. detention facility. For Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the blame for the plight of the separated and orphaned children rested with their parents: “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out.”
Echoing the response to the previous controversial acts of the administration, many Republicans supported the DACA decision and the hardline, zero-tolerance immigration policy, as it reflected the fervent views of their base. Democrats’ protests fell on the deaf ears of the administration. Again, the traditional levers of politics failed on one issue—immigration—about which a majority of Americans wanted sensible, humane reforms.
Just as with previous controversial actions of the Trump administration, the outcry against ending DACA and the hardline family separation policy was strong and swift. Activists went online and into the streets in the tens of thousands across the country to protest. Lawyers filed suits in courts to block the administration’s actions.
And again, corporate executives joined the activists’ cause to try to restrain the most powerful person in the world. CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tim Cook of Apple publicly condemned the actions and vowed to fight for the immigrants affected by DACA. After the rescission of DACA, Zuckerberg stated, “It is particularly cruel to offer young people the American dream, encourage them to come out of the shadows and trust our government, and then punish them for it.” Hundreds of business leaders also wrote an open letter to the president and congressional leaders, imploring them to act on behalf of the young people affected by DACA. They did the same for the hardline family separation policy. These titans of industry would join their voices, prestige, and resources with the efforts of activists to try to bring about change where the process of government had failed.
In part as a result of this wave of corporate social activism and the bad press coverage it helped engender, the Trump administration lost several lawsuits, including one in the U.S. Supreme Court on DACA, and President Trump issued a new executive order to end the family separation policy.
The Failed Insurrection
After nearly four tumultuous and consequential years, President Trump lost his reelection bid to Vice President Joe Biden. Rather than graciously concede the election and begin a peaceful transition like almost every one of his predecessors, Trump engaged in an unprecedented, prolonged effort to overturn the presidential election, which led to a failed insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
In the 2020 election, during a pandemic that was killing thousands of people each day, Americans turned out to vote in record numbers. And largely because of the pandemic, a record number of Americans voted early and voted by mail. Because of these unusual circumstances, the election results were not known on election night, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as millions of votes were still being tabulated. By Saturday, November 7, 2020, major television networks and the Associated Press called the presidential race for Biden.
Instead of conceding, Trump and his supporters claimed, without providing any real evidence, that there was massive voter fraud and that the election had been stolen from him. In the ensuing weeks, as each state legislature certified its election results, Trump and his supporters pressured state legislators and election officials to overturn the will of the people and disenfranchise millions of voters. Fortunately, these efforts on the state level failed as each state certified its results in accordance with the tallied votes.
On January 6, 2021, Congress convened, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding over the session, to count and certify each state’s electoral college votes, as required under the Constitution. In a last-gasp effort, Trump spent the days preceding the certification pressuring Pence to overturn the election result, even though the vice president does not possess that legal power.
On January 6, Trump and his supporters gathered at a “Save America” rally, hoping to intimidate members of Congress to object and deny the final certification of the election results. The speakers at the rally again riled up the crowd of Trump supporters with baseless claims of a fraudulent and stolen election. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” and “walk down to the Capitol” and “show strength” to Congress. Thousands of supporters marched toward the Capitol, overpowered the police, tore down barricades, scaled walls, and entered the Capitol as Congress was moving to certify the election. Once inside, this band of marauders ransacked the hallowed halls of Congress, stole documents, vandalized property, and injured numerous police officers. They entered the Senate and House Chambers seeking to harm Pence and other officials like Speaker Pelosi.
During the insurrection, President Trump reportedly watched without concern from the comfort of the White House. After pressure from his senior staff, Trump put out a video calling the rioters “very special people” and asking them to “go home in peace.”
Hours later, the insurrection ended, quelled by the National Guard. Congress returned late in the evening and ultimately certified Joe Biden as the president-elect of the United States. Yet even after the insurrection, over a hundred House Republicans and a handful of senators, namely Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, objected to the certification of the election results from the states.
Five people died as a result of this failed insurrection.
In the days that followed, a stunned nation and world watched as the president continued to refuse to explicitly concede the election. And again, many in his party refused to condemn him.
In a surprising move, many of America’s largest corporations spoke out openly and strongly against the insurrection and temporarily suspended campaign contributions, particularly to elected officials who had attempted to overturn the election. Hundreds of companies, like Airbnb, Microsoft, Walmart, and the Walt Disney Company, paused political contributions in response to the failed insurrection. Not surprisingly, this got the attention of the elected officials, as the oxygen for the campaigns was suddenly turned off.
Most significantly, social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube suspended President Trump from their platforms. According to multiple reports, the ban from Twitter deeply angered Trump, as it deprived him of his preferred megaphone of communication to his fervent followers and the world. Additionally, many high-profile businesses and law firms severed their ties to Trump-affiliated business after the failed insurrection. Notably, the PGA took away the 2022 PGA Championship previous scheduled for Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. This PGA’s decision reportedly greatly upset President Trump, an avid golfer and fan of the game.
In the waning days of Trump’s presidency, he was impeached an unprecedented second time, and President Joe Biden was sworn in on Wednesday, January 20, 2021. About a month later, Trump was acquitted in the Senate, with fifty-seven guilty votes and forty-three not guilty votes, failing to meet the constitutional threshold of sixty-seven votes for a conviction, even though it was the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.
A New Politics of Business
The four years of the Trump administration brought incredibly damaging tumult and chaos to the country during a period of political dysfunction and dangerous hyperpartisanship. The world saw firsthand what can happen when the most powerful man in the world operates with little to no governmental checks. Undoubtedly, the forces unleashed or resurfaced by former president Trump and his supporters will continue to animate and influence American politics. That said, the four years of the Trump administration also awakened a new sense of activism and civic duty in this country, which will also continue to animate and influence American politics. It gave birth to a new sense of politics and civics in America.
People of all ages and from all classes, creeds, and backgrounds engaged in protests for the first time in the name of racial justice, environment protection, democracy, and the rule of law. And businesses were moved by the actions of the people—the same people that were their customers, employees, shareholders, and fellow citizens—to speak out and act against social injustice. While the legacy of the four years of the Trump presidency remains to be written, one important chapter in the first draft should be about the rise of the new force for social progress that united activists and capitalists to work together when our elected officials were unwilling or unable to check and restrain abuses of power. Whether that new force will be used in a consistent and sustained fashion remains to be seen, but that force has been undeniably awakened.