American business leaders remain silent on Trump's policies and only consider speaking out when the stock market plummets

unlike in Trump's first term, current American business leaders are publicly silent on the president's trade policies, despite expressing strong concerns in private. At a Yale CEO Core Group meeting, executives in attendance were shocked by the news that the Trump administration might double Canadian steel and aluminum tariffs, but hours later at a business roundtable meeting during a Q&A session with Trump, these CEOs avoided raising sharp questions.

Business leaders attending the Yale meeting included Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, and Albert Bourla of Pfizer, among others. In an impromptu survey, 44% of CEOs said they would only collectively criticize the president's policies if the stock market fell by 20%, while another 22% believed a 30% drop was necessary to take a stand, and nearly a quarter of CEOs believed that publicly opposing the government was not their responsibility.

According to former Medtronic CEO Bill George, many business leaders are concerned that public criticism will make them targets of the president's attacks and compel him to stick to the tariff agenda. Meanwhile, business outlook on the economy has become bleak, with an IACPA survey showing that the proportion of executives expressing optimism about the U.S. economy has dropped from 67% in the fourth quarter of last year to the current 47%.