Before Charlottesville, President Trump Had More Than 300 Meetings with Corporate Executives
Aug. 24, 2017
Before Charlottesville, President Trump Had More Than 300 Meetings with Corporate Executives
Public Citizen Tally Shows Trump Already Has Held Three Times as Many Meetings with Corporate Executives as Obama During His Entire Eight Years as President
WASHINGTON, D.C. – After only 216 days in office, President Donald Trump has already met with triple the number of CEOs as President Barack Obama did during the entire eight years of his presidency, according to a new report by Public Citizen. Trump’s devotion to CEO meetings was unrelenting, abated only by CEOs bowing to public pressure to abandon associating with Trump after he compared peaceful Charlottesville protesters to neo-Nazis.
Since Election Day, Trump has had at least 385 meetings with 317 executives representing more than 300 corporations.
According to a National Bureau of Economic Research analysis of the Obama administration’s White House visitor logs, Obama had exactly 100 corporate executive meetings during his entire two terms in office.
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, he has had at least 339 corporate executive meetings, more than triple the number Obama conducted in eight years.
The corporate executives who met most frequently with Trump, according to publicly available sources, are:
• Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris (five meetings);
• General Motors CEO Mary Barra (four meetings);
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty (five meetings);
• Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky (four meetings);
• Lockheed Martin President Marilyn Hewson (five meetings);
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk (four meetings); and
• U.S. Steel CEO Mario Longhi (four meetings)
All seven are former members of the advisory councils Trump disbanded last week.
“There’s been no outbreak of conscience in Corporate America, said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Big Corporations have been rushing to consort with President Trump in an effort to win regulatory roll backs, tax cuts and other favors. Public pressure on CEOs after Charlottesville has put that on temporary hold, but we should anticipate it resuming soon.”
“Corporate CEOs may have tried to distance themselves from Trump after Charlottesville, but before Charlottesville, they swamped the president in an effort to push their deregulatory, anti-tax, pro-polluter agenda,” added Rick Claypool, a Public Citizen research director and author of the study.
Read the report.
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