CEOs on Guard as Trump Rattles Companies With Series of Edicts

For American CEOs, reaping the rewards of a Donald Trump presidency is a little more complicated the second time around, in an administration that increasingly pairs conventional conservative deregulation with populist state intervention in big business.

In the last week, the president has fired off a series of demands and edicts aimed at C-suites, all in service of shoring up his political fortunes as midterm elections approach.

Trump signed an executive order pressing defense contractors to cut buybacks, and individually called out Raytheon, the defense unit of RTX Corp., an aerospace and defense behemoth that supplies the Patriot missile system and Pratt & Whitney jet engines to the Defense Department.

After the surprise strike last weekend that toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said that major oil producers would plow billions of dollars of investment into that country’s petroleum sector – a decision that the companies seemed unlikely to have made on their own.

Trump also said this week he would try to ban institutional investors like Blackstone Inc. from investing in single-family housing, as he grasped for a political cudgel to fight the rising cost of living. And he lavished praise on Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan on Thursday after meeting with him at the White House — touting the “great deal” his administration had struck earlier this year for the federal government to buy as much as 10% of the chipmaker.

Together, the moves showed a willingness to intercede in the operations of the private sector that is unprecedented in the modern era and would’ve been unthinkable among previous generations of Republican politicians. And they came in the same week that the president was stunning allies and foes alike on the global stage — including by arresting Maduro, vaguely threatening other Western Hemisphere nations and again toying with attempting to acquire Greenland over fierce European opposition.

One year into Trump’s second term, his deregulatory agenda, government cost-cutting efforts and implementation of tariffs are far more aggressive than in his first.

Some businesses are pushing back, including more than 1,000 firms that have joined lawsuits contesting Trump’s tariffs across massive swaths of the economy. Still, corporate executives and lobbyists also say the administration is in more regular contact and more receptive to feedback, including regular calls and meetings with top officials, compared to the Biden administration, in which aides kept a tight circle around the former president.

Even as Trump puts CEOs on guard, he remains as eager as ever for the acclamation and acceptance of big business and Wall Street.

That dynamic was on full display Friday, when he summoned leaders of oil majors – including Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp., and ConocoPhillips Co. – to an awkward summit at the White House to discuss Venezuela. There, the president happily pledged $100 billion of the companies’ capital toward rebuilding the Venezuelan oil sector, even as industry insiders say both oil prices and political sensitivities make such an investment a questionable bet.

“If you don’t want to go in, just let me know, because I got 25 people that aren’t here today that are willing to take your place,” the president said.

That didn’t necessarily mean corporate leaders would bend to Trump’s wishes entirely. At the meeting, Exxon CEO Darren Woods pointed out that the company has had its assets in Venezuela seized twice by the state, and remains wary of reentering the market.

“Today, it’s uninvestable,” he said.

After the White House meeting, Trump took to Truth Social as he headed to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for the weekend, calling for a one-year cap on credit card interest rates at 10%, effective Jan. 20, without specifying details.

For the C-suite crowd who have largely welcomed many Trump policies on taxation, regulation and government debt, it wasn’t always so difficult to manage.

At the outset of Trump’s first term, executives at what was then called United Technologies Corp. were feeling good.

In 2017, as the new administration and congressional Republicans were set to revamp the tax code, executives at the conglomerate were salivating at the chance to unlock some $6 billion in cash held overseas. For executives at the company, which then owned Pratt & Whitney, along with the elevator company Otis and the HVAC giant Carrier Corp., the tax change would clear the way for billions of dollars of stock buybacks to reward Wall Street and themselves.

“Our capital allocation remains disciplined,” then-Chief Executive Officer Greg Hayes told investors in the summer of 2017, as the company continued with its plan to spend $3.5 billion that year buying back its own shares.

For RTX, which Hayes helped forge through the 2020 merger of United Technologies’ aerospace businesses and defense contractor Raytheon, navigating Trump’s whims in 2026 isn’t quite so easy. (Hayes stepped down as RTX’s CEO in 2024.)

In a series of social media posts on Wednesday, the president sent defense stocks soaring with an impulsive demand to add $500 billion to the Pentagon budget, in a move that would elevate military appropriations to $1.5 trillion.

Yet in other posts and an executive order, Trump rebuked defense contractors, — in one post singling out Raytheon by name — demanding they halt buybacks, increase their spending on domestic manufacturing and cap executive pay.

RTX hasn’t commented on Trump’s remarks.

In a statement, the Aerospace Industries Association, which represents defense contractors and their suppliers, said it shared the administration’s concerns with national security and bolstering weapons stockpiles.

“We will continue working with them to advance policies that reward performance, strengthen the defense industrial base, and keep America ahead of fast-moving threats,” the group’s president, Eric Fanning, said.

An executive at a corporate consulting firm said Friday that clients were all discussing the volley of interventions Trump and his administration have made into American business. To a one, this person said, his clients were focused on avoiding becoming the direct target of Trump’s ire, as RTX had, while trying to plan their response strategies should the president turn his focus onto them.

Trump’s approach to business might not be the largest source of concern for corporate America. The Republican Party has been largely remade from a pro-business, conservative enterprise into a movement loyal to the president’s pet peeves and grudges. And it increasingly seems willing to follow him into a pattern of government intervention in private enterprise that would have been anathema to the GOP not long ago.

This week, some Democrats in Congress cheered the notion of clamping down on buybacks, while Republican lawmakers, uncharacteristically, didn’t object.

Defense companies seemed to be “more concerned about Wall Street and their quarterly reports than they are about our defense production,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican, told Bloomberg News on Thursday.

Of Trump, he said: “I understand his frustration.”