Corporate America Won’t Even Defend *Itself*

Earlier this month we invited speechwriters and executive communication professionals to share, at whatever level of confidentiality they desired, how they’re faring in the new administration: “What is going on with you at work? What kinds of conversations are you (and aren’t you) having with your leaders, with your colleagues … with yourself? What are you seeing, what are you doing, what are you feeling?” Here’s something we received this week, from a longtime and current corporate executive communication director. Your reactions are welcome. —ed.

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I was going to write a thing.

• About how the collective silence from corporate America is helping to enable the Trump Administration’s wanton dismantling of the constitutional order and rule of law, and its replacement with an autocratic Mafia state.
• About how the loss of those protections is an existential threat to the very business environment that has made corporate America possible and created the conditions for its success, from stable administration and competent regulation to clear structures for accountability and protections against abuse.
• About how the most well-respected American companies with an international presence scrupulously avoid doing business in places, such as Mafia states, that don’t abide by those rules. If not out of principle, then for the simple reason that operating under such lawless conditions comes with an unacceptable level of risk.
• About how the awesome economic might that corporate America has accrued from the American system gives it the power to push back against those who are now directing its destruction.
• About how in the face of their apparent reluctance to do so, the employees of those companies, who have likewise benefitted from the many blessings of the American system, have the power to push their leadership to step up and take a clear stand as corporate citizens – just as they did with George Floyd’s murder and the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
• About how the business case for taking such a stand could be righteously made, not merely as a social, ethical, and political obligation, but a fiduciary duty as well.

Then this week, I read about the meek response from Apple’s Tim Cook, the billionaire CEO of one of the wealthiest and most influential American corporations in the entire world, to Trump’s outrageous demand that the company abandon its DEI programs—policies that had just won the clear vote of support from the company’s shareholders, the literal owners of the company.

And I read about the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, directing that the paper’s opinion page can publish only those opinions that he agrees with.

And I read that the U.S. financial markets regard any existential threat to American prosperity with a collective yawn. 

And I saw that believing, even for a minute, that corporate America might bestir itself to protect and defend the system that birthed it was naïve folly. 

And I realized that there was no longer any point to the thing I wanted to write. Because there was no thing there. At all.