American business should not empower a criminal, says Reid Hoffman

Read time: 5 minutes

Jun 6th 2024

WOULD NEW YORK be a global financial capital, or even a prosperous city, if markets had no basis for trusting the transactions that happen there? Obviously not.

Businesses and investors rely on a robust legal system—especially courts of law and impartial, fact-based trials by jury—to enforce contracts and punish fraud. That’s why, in the past decade alone, New York City prosecutors have brought thousands of felony charges for falsifying business records. It’s a crime because it strikes at American prosperity.

For American business, the rule of law is essential. It is the soil in which commerce can take root and grow. Without this stable, predictable, rules-based environment, New York, and America, would not have become the hubs of innovation, investment, profit and progress that they are.

Unfortunately, many American business leaders have recently developed a kind of myopia, miscalculating what politics, and which political leaders, will truly support their long-term success. Perhaps this stems from their having lived their entire lives in a stable legal regime that they now take for granted. But a robust, reliable legal system is not a given. It is a necessity we can ill afford to live without. We trade it away at our peril.

Which makes it all the more lamentable that a growing number of America’s corporate and financial leaders are opening their wallets for Donald Trump.

Of course, few of these leaders would do actual business with Mr Trump. Even fewer would trust him to pay his bills. Long before the Electoral College made him president in 2016, Mr Trump was known as a liar and grifter who would browbeat vendors and debtors. More recently, American courts—including two unanimous juries—have found him to have engaged in sexual assault, defamation, fraud (including misuse of charitable funds) and—by a unanimous Colorado Supreme Court—insurrection.

So why are so many of my business-leader peers writing cheques to give nearly unchecked power to a man with whom they wouldn’t sign a condominium contract? There are a few explanations.

Some kid themselves, or pretend, that Mr Trump can be normal and controlled. Never mind the striking refusal by his former vice-president, Mike Pence, to endorse him as the Republican nominee. Or the stinging words of John Kelly, Mr Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, who has called him “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our constitution, and the rule of law”. Dozens of other former Trump officials, military leaders and campaign operatives echo this analysis.

Others of Mr Trump’s business-class supporters claim that President Joe Biden is somehow more dangerous than the convicted felon and pathological liar. The laziest cite the actions of far-left figures who play no role in Mr Biden’s administration. Relatively more serious critics mention disagreeable Democratic economic policies. When they manage to get specific with their criticisms, I sometimes agree. But if economics is their metric, it seems not just irrational but deeply irresponsible for them to ignore some clear financial truths. Under Mr Biden America has hit record after record: in stockmarkets, oil and gas production, employment and more. And its GDP growth is the envy of most of the world’s economies.

Sadly, the true motives of some in Mr Trump’s camp are even uglier. He and his ideological allies have been quite explicit: upon regaining power, they intend to corrupt the legal system to use the state against political opponents. Some American elites support this autocratic agenda because in such a Trumpist regime they expect to be the new oligarchs. Others fear that opposing Mr Trump will bring retaliation, so seek safety by pledging loyalty.

Most conventionally, of course, there is the simple siren promise of a second Trump term’s lower corporate-tax rates and softer regulatory enforcement. But it’s all penny-wise at best, when stacked against the likelihood of, say, Justice, State and Defence Departments purged and restaffed with MAGA cronies, loyal not to the USA but to DJT.

There is a historical pattern to the collapse of the rule of law in advanced countries: it happens when powerful groups naively judge that a strongman will stay contained. Today’s pro-Trump business elites are making the same crucial mistake as any other influential group choosing to empower an autocrat. To paraphrase Tim Snyder, a Yale historian: “He is not your strongman—he is his own strongman.”

Mr Trump’s felony convictions in the Stormy Daniels election-interference case, and the subsequent Republican attack on the American judicial system, have clarified this election’s epochal stakes: the systemic rule of law versus the capricious rule of a strongman.

America’s rules-based system, with its stability and continuity, has delivered enormous gains to the country—and to humanity. America saw its first peaceful transfer of political power in 1801. This proud tradition went unbroken until the Capitol attack of January 6th 2021. And the man who broke with it, a criminal, is dead-set on scuttling the system that really did make America great.

When the courts go against him, as they so often have, Mr Trump claims—just like every other “wrongly” convicted felon—that the system is rigged. Meanwhile his lawyers have argued at the Supreme Court that as president he should be permitted any use of state violence. And Mr Trump’s party is now committed to delegitimising, rejecting and attacking juries, courts, elections and any other mechanisms that might hold the leader legally or electorally accountable. The danger speaks for itself.

In short, the rule of law is on the line in this election. Americans who prize respect for the law, stability and prosperity—including even business leaders who might value the last of these most highly—should take Mr Trump literally and seriously, and do everything they can to prevent his return to the White House. ■

Reid Hoffman is a tech entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and co-founder of LinkedIn. He provided third-party financial support for E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits, which led to two unanimous guilty verdicts against Donald Trump.