Ralph Nader: To Chamber Of Commerce Trumpers – Watch What You Wish For – OpEd
Open Letter to President and CEO Suzanne P. Clark of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
Dear President Clark,
The Chamber has come a long way without my advice. However, perhaps, you will indulge my curiosity over the majority of your members supporting Donald Trump for President.
There are few conditions that the business community craves more than stability and predictability. Donald Trump is a daily chaos machine. He survives and thrives on turmoil. It is integral to his egocentric personality and supercilious character traits. It is also terribly distracting for those who focus on the business of business. It produces unproductive divisions and uproars which are bad for society and the economy. It is no secret that Mr. Trump will pursue policies of revenge against his political opponents, judges, law enforcers, and others who dared to openly defy him. Recall his July 2019 declaration, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” That has been hismodus vivendi.
Whole classes of people, critical to the functioning of the economy, are on his retribution hit list. If elected, Trump, a convicted felon and the subject of multiple indictments will target immigrants, academic specialists, student activists, and a wide swath of Americans he stereotypes as “leftists, Marxists and lunatics.” People who happen to not like Trump, his outlawry, fact deprivations, prevarications, bigotry, misogyny, and his contempt for those he calls “suckers and losers,” including people with disabilities, are all at risk. Even retired generals, usually reluctant to enter the political fray, are now speaking out in no uncertain terms against Trump’s candidacy.
Consider some specific policy positions he has stridently advanced. Trump thinks higher tariffs across the board, are paid by the foreign exporter and not passed on to consumers as higher prices. Do you know any business economists who have accepted this bizarre notion? Apart from this inflationary impact, a tariff war is believed to invite certain retaliation by foreign countries.
Trump, regularly, rejects grave realities, past and present, replacing them with serious delusions. He cannot process information and brags about not reading.
Trump incites violence and brings out the worst kind of hatefulness against large groups of Americans whom he paints as “enemies within.” Many of these people merely disagree with Trump. He seriously degrades reasonable trust in the electoral process by characterizing elections he loses as being “rigged.” Moreover, where pro-Trump governors and legislators are in office, varieties of unprecedented voter suppression and purges are rampant. Your late predecessor, Thomas J. Donohue rejected such “conduct” as eroding “our democratic institutions.”
The Chamber may like his additional tax-cutting promises until, your economists tally up the deficits. The federal debt now takes more interest dollars to service than the Pentagon’s budget. The ever-increasing, unaudited military budget, it is never enough for Trump and causes a serious diversion from public budgets for job-producing investments in infrastructure repair and upgrading so essential for a modern corporate economy.
Trump also wants to compromise the touted independence of the Federal Reserve. It is part of his web of presidential control and he is, as you know, a control freak. What is different from his first term is that, if elected, he would bring in a larger number of political appointees with extreme ideological biases and utter contempt for the civil service. Does the Chamber wish to return to the 19thcentury “spoils system” and the corrosive corruption that it fostered? Corruption often involves overreaching business crooks who give your community a bad name and incessant negative headlines.
Imagine the labor disruptions that would be caused by Trump’s determination to generate the largest deportations in American history. Over and over again he calls immigrants criminals, drug traffickers and invokes a variety of equally vile and unfounded sweeping stereotypes. His base will insist on his follow-through. This will also provoke serious ethnic tensions with costly collateral damage to critical sectors of the economy.
The oil, gas, and coal companies comprise a key bloc of your membership. They applaud Trump calling climate violence a “hoax and his “drill baby drill” mantra. Unfortunately, mega-hurricanes, mega-floods, and mega-wildfires will have the final verdict on Trump’s destructive scrapping of a swifter transition to renewable and conservation efficiencies.
You may like his constant reference to “deregulation” or as he has recently called for “no regulation.” Aside from studies showing the benefits of regulatory standards (see what weak regulation has done to Boeing since 2020) and protection of health and safety, what do you really have to fear from the best corporate Democrats money can buy? Besides you have a corporate judiciary bolstered by powerful corporate law firms, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Chamber’s members are predominantly Republican from years of allegiance to the GOP. Trump, the Republican nominee has repeatedly refused to accede to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose in November. You may wish to urgently advise your members to “Be careful what they wish for.”