Why Many Business Leaders Are Worried about Trump’s VP Pick

Two weeks ago, we wrote that business leaders are not flocking to GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, with no Fortune 100 CEOs having donated financially to Trump this year—a pattern broken only now by Elon Musk’s pronouncement Monday. While we commendably saw a surge of statements of sympathy from business leaders in the hours following the despicable, horrendous assassination attempt on Trump this weekend, Trump’s selection of freshman Ohio Senator J.D. Vance once again emphasizes the vast gulf separating Trump from the business community, and reflects Trump’s most brazen anti-capitalist instincts.

J.D. Vance was certainly not the business community’s favorite to be Trump’s VP by a long shot. Even several Republican CEOs I’ve spoken with are disappointed by the selection of Vance, and all of them would have strongly preferred any alternative, especially candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, cut from more traditional pro-business GOP cloth. The Wall Street Journal just condemned the socially divisive Vance nomination as “curious,” explaining, “He opposes free-market policies Mr. Trump will need for economic renewal…. We suspect the White House is relieved he didn’t choose a more experienced and reassuring political figure.” Some top donors such as Ken Griffin and Rupert Murdoch even reportedly launched a last-second Stop Vance blitzkrieg in desperation. The only donors who have been in Vance’s corner are a small, insular circle of Silicon Valley personalities.

Of course, business leaders are hardly enthusiastic about Biden, with many of them finding especially objectionable the Biden Administration’s harsh antitrust enforcement, spearheaded by FTC Chair Lina Khan—but it is exactly these same anti-business parts of the Biden agenda which J.D. Vance wants to double down on. In February of this year, at a Bloomberg conference, Vance declared: “a lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan, and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing.’ And I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden Administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” Vance recently joined forces with progressive colleagues such as Senator Elizabeth Warren to introduce bills ranging from the “Stop Subsidizing Giant Mergers Act” to efforts to break up big banks.

This marriage of the far right with the far left scares CEOs, who are not isolationist, protectionist, or xenophobic, and dislike regulatory overreach. Antitrust is only the tip of the iceberg; Vance’s expressed economic policy positions, which far outflank traditional Republican stances, sets off alarm bells in corporate boardrooms across the country.

Many of Vance’s economic policy stances amount to an American CEO’s worst nightmare; a smorgasbord of populist promises which will expand government’s reach into the economy, undermine global confidence, and subvert free markets.

In particular, business voices have expressed alarm at Vance’s repeated support for protectionist tariffs, an echo of Trump’s own calls for 10% tariffs on everything coming in the U.S. from any country. Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists have warned that inflation would be turbocharged by up to 10% per some estimates if these tariffs are enacted.

In some areas, Vance’s views are far more radical than Trump’s. Vance is on record supporting higher taxes on corporations, advocating “no more subsidies to the anti-American business class” and declaring “it’s time America wages war on companies.” Likewise, Vance is enthusiastic about devaluing the dollar; his claims that devaluation is not as scary as it seems do not land well with business leaders, who are dependent on the strength of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency to reach vast global markets.

For many business leaders, to know Vance is not to love him.

Vance’s first boss Steve Case has rushed to distance himself from Vance, while Vance’s other early boss, Peter Thiel, has pledged not to donate a single penny to Trump this year. Another early mentor of Vance’s, Mitt Romney, once mused, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance… How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

CEOs are not isolationists and were alarmed by Vance’s disdain for Ukraine’s plight and E.U. fears, which he expressed at the Munich Security Conference in March, stating, “I really don’t care what happens to Ukraine.” Over 1,200 major western companies pulled out of Russia over Putin's bloody invasion of Ukraine, which threatened sovereign stability and the rule of law.

President Joe Biden reacted to Vance’s selection by calling him a “clone” of Trump, but to many in the business world, Vance might be worse than a Trump clone—he is Trump’s id, drawing out all of Trump’s most anti-business instincts without any of Trump’s dealmaking instincts. The biggest beneficiary may be Biden, who ought to be celebrating Vance’s selection as proof that the self-destructive version of Trump is re-remerging on the campaign trail.