Why Are These Business Leaders So Dumb?
Why Are These Business Leaders So Dumb?
The conventional wisdom is that they're greedy AND smart, but…
Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, is well practiced in the art of pretending that various left-of-center epiphenomena are harbingers of Nazism, in order to justify supporting unpopular right-wing candidates and ideas.
"It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,” he said of President Obama in 2010, condemning Obama’s proposal to end the tax preference for carried interest.
It’s thus darkly funny, 14 years later, to discover (or confirm, I suppose) that Schwarzman has no principled beef with things like “antisemitism” and “rule by force.” Because he supports Donald Trump.
Prior to the Trump era, the purpose of Schwarzman’s hyperbole was to defame tax-increasing liberals more than to make excuses for his own politics. He’s a Republican. Mitt Romney is a Republican—and a former private equity big-wig in his own right. Their affinity was perfectly natural, as was Schwarzman’s desire to see Obama defeated. That doesn’t justify comparing tax increases to Nazism, but it does explain why he wanted to smear Democrats, and Romney’s genuine disdain for Nazism and antisemitism made those smears fairly frictionless.
Under Trump, Schwarzman’s go-to rhetorical maneuver has come under some strain because Trump makes common cause with actual Nazis, and analogizes himself to Adolf Hitler. “This is like just before the Holocaust,” Trump told donors recently, veering in his remarks between philo- and antisemitic tropes. “You had a weak president or head of the country. And it just built and built. And then, all of a sudden, you ended up with Hitler. You ended up with a problem like nobody knew.”
Ask yourself: Who’s Joe Biden in this comparison, and who’s Trump?
Thus, post-insurrection, Schwarzman had adopted a pose of Trump skepticism. But when confronted with the possibility of paying higher taxes in a second Biden term, he nevertheless re-endorsed Trump, using his putative concern for Jewish safety as a fig leaf once again.
It reveals the desperate, guilty conscience of a man who enjoys everything in life but the courage of his convictions. Schwarzman’s conviction in this case is something like: another big tax cut will do more for me than any downside of mainstreaming of Nazism and right-wing violence. In his case, that narrow calculation might be correct—$40 billion can buy a lot of insulation from social ills.
But his implicit belief is that a second Trump term will leave him richer than a second Biden term. That view is very much in vogue among the business and financial elite this election season. It’s why Jamie Dimon test-drove bizarre Trump apologetics at Davos earlier this year. It’s at least in part why Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into a vast, thrumming, right-wing hate rally (though Musk is a multidimensionally broken person).
And with enough cherry-picking and decontextualization, it’s a pretty easy case to make:
Trump cut corporate taxes and deregulated industry. He stacked the courts with judges who are extremely hostile to the administrative state, unions, and environmental and financial rules. If it hadn’t been for that darn pandemic (which we don’t count against him), he would’ve been the best president for corporate leaders in decades. The insurrection was A Bad Look™ but it didn’t succeed and Trump will be term-limited anyhow.
Biden will also be term limited, but, by contrast, he presided over inflation (which we do count against him). He raised our taxes and wants to raise them further. We can ignore Trump’s bluster, because Trump bullshits constantly, but when Biden says he wants to, e.g., tax unrealized capital gains, that’s very serious indeed. Ergo Trump’s the safer bet to protect our interests.
You can see why people might convince themselves of something like this—just not particularly smart people.