I Know What America’s Leading C.E.O.s Really Think of Donald Trump
By Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld – June 23, 2024
Dr. Sonnenfeld is the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.
CreditCredit…Stephan Dybus
Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.
That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.
I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.
The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.
If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of Taft and stretching through Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns.
Mr. Trump secured the White House partly by tapping into the anticorporate, populist messaging of Bernie Sanders, who was then a candidate, a move that Mr. Trump discussed with me when I met him in 2015. The strategy might have won voters but did little to enhance Mr. Trump’s image with the business community. And while a number of chief executives tried to work with Mr. Trump as they would with any incumbent president and many celebrated his move to cut the corporate tax rate, wariness persisted.
Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Big business’s relationship and likelihood of future support for Mr. Biden is complicated. The president has also adopted populist stances toward business, though he has chafed at pressure from progressives to be even more combative. Nevertheless, chief executives commonly rail at what they view as excessively restrictive antitrust enforcement and misguided attacks on corporate greed.
And their legitimate misgivings about Mr. Biden are overwhelmed by worries about Mr. Trump, version 2024. Mr. Trump’s primary conduits to the business community in his first term — more-reasonable voices like those of Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Steven Mnuchin — are gone, replaced by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists.
The MAGA die-hard voices that have Mr. Trump’s ear often have more in common with the far left than with the traditional Republican Party. Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.
With two or three prominent exceptions, most business voices now hanging around the hoop would normally be in the minor leagues of Republican business supporters. The party must long for the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, when there were so many business leaders in support and fully 60 percent of his cabinet were chief executives.
As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.
That there are more Fortune 100 chief executives based in the smallest state in the nation, Rhode Island — and there’s exactly one Fortune 100 chief executive who is based there — than currently support Mr. Trump tells you how truly isolated the Republican presidential candidate is from the halls of big business.
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld is a professor in the practice of leadership at the Yale School of Management and the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.
Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill last week to visit with House Republicans. According to most reports of the meeting, he rambled.
People present told the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS that the former president “treated his meeting as an opportunity to deliver a behind-closed-doors, stream-of-consciousness rant” in which he “tried to settle scores in the House G.O.P., trashed the city of Milwaukee and took a shot at Nancy Pelosi’s ‘wacko’ daughter.” It was “like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.”
That same week, Trump met with a group of chief executives at the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable. Attendees, CNBC reports, were disappointed. “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one executive. Others said that Trump was “remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought and was all over the map.”
There is a good chance that by the end of the year, Trump will be president-elect of the United States. And yet with less than five months left before the election, he is no more prepared for a second term than he was for a first. He may even be less prepared: less capable of organizing his thoughts, less able to speak with any coherence and less willing to do or learn anything that might help him overcome his deficiencies.
Everything that made Trump a bad president the first time around promises to make him an even worse one in a second term.
When I say “bad” here, I don’t mean the content of Trump’s agenda, as objectionable as it is, as much as I do his ability to handle the job of chief executive of the United States. In a political culture as obsessed with drama and celebrity as our own, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the presidency is an actual job — one of the most difficult in the world.
“Just a partial list of all that must go right in a presidency starts to stretch the limits of human endeavor,” John Dickerson, a reporter and anchor for CBS News, writes in “The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency.”
“A president,” he goes on to say, “needs to pick the right team in a hurry, including a chief of staff who gets the balance of information flow, delegation and gatekeeping just right. The cabinet needs to be filled with leaders who have autonomy but not so much ego that they create political disasters. A president must have exquisite fingertip feel for prioritization, communication and political nuance.”
Trump, in his first term, was not equipped to do the work required of him.
As Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist, notes in a post for his Substack newsletter, Trump “utterly failed” at the “most important thing for presidents to do in order to succeed: collecting information. Trump didn’t read. He didn’t pay attention during briefings. He didn’t care about policy. He didn’t even bother, as far as anyone can tell, to learn the basic rules of the constitutional system.”
It’s not as if we can expect things to be better in a second term. “Everyone makes mistakes and ideally learns from them,” Matthew Yglesias observes in a recent analysis of Trump’s record as president. “As best I can tell, what Trump learned from his term is that he needs to double down on surrounding himself with craven loyalists who won’t contradict him.”
There is an obvious rejoinder here: How is it possible that Trump is both incompetent and a dangerous authoritarian? How can he undermine American democracy when he struggles to manage his administration?
The answer is that this only seems like a contradiction. In truth, these two sides of the former president are easy to reconcile.
Trump’s authoritarian instincts — his refusal to accept or even learn the rules of the constitutional system — are a huge part of the reason he struggled in the job of president. They helped produce the chaos of his administration. That, in turn, has led him to want to corrode and strip away those rules and strictures that stand in the way of his desire to impose his will directly, both on the government and the country at large.
As Dickerson writes, “Trump is in rebellion against the presidency. Its traditions get in the way of the quick results he wants. He either sidesteps or flattens obstacles or opponents that irritate him or slow him down.”
By no means is Trump the first president or even the first Republican president to abuse the power of the office in an effort to overcome the constitutional limits of the office. We can see something similar with Richard Nixon and Watergate as well as Ronald Reagan and Iran-contra, when the White House circumvented a congressional prohibition on foreign aid to rebel groups in Nicaragua.
But Trump makes no distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is the kind of man who might say, “L’état, c’est moi” if he knew of anything other than his own desires. He has the heart of an absolutist.
For Trump to bend to the presidency, he would have to embark on the impossible task of denying himself the satisfaction of imposing his will on others. And so he has tried to break the presidency instead, to transform a constitutional office defined by its limits into an instrument of his personal authority.
A second term would mean even more of the chaos, corruption, disorder and incompetence that defined his first four years in office. Trump and his more ideologically driven allies and advisers would smash through the constitutional system in a reckless drive to satisfy their dreams, desires and delusions.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington.
Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and the author of a book about Russia, “Echoes of a Native Land.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews, to celebrate the first year (there would not be many more) of the lively local Russian-language weekly, The New American. It was a grand event, rich in humor and tinged with nostalgia. I asked a middle-aged partygoer for his thoughts on his lost homeland, and his reply has stayed with me: “I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”
It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.
Most probably will not.
It’s hard to say precisely where Russian exiles stand, politically or in their sense of attachment to Russia. The waves of emigrants differ widely one from another, and in the United States, they have not behaved like immigrants from Italy, China or Poland who formed hyphenated-American communities and organizations that have persisted over generations. Russian immigrants to America have, by comparison, melded quickly into the general population. Brighton Beach is one of the few places with any Russian flavor in the United States.
Still, the prevailing attitude I’ve encountered among Russian émigrés is the love-hate expressed by my interlocutor in Brighton Beach. It’s the love of an extraordinary culture, a deep attachment to the expanse of steppes and taiga, along with contempt for the chronic misrule, adventurism, imperial illusions and corruption of the leaders.
At least, that was the attitude before Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, I more often encounter, and feel, a new attitude: shame.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The émigrés I grew up with, and those I came to know in America and as a reporter in Israel, rarely felt troubled by the sins of their motherland. Why would they? There were no politics in the usual sense in the Russia they came from, no sense among the vast majority of the population that they had any say in what their self-perpetuating leaders did for them or to them from behind the Kremlin ramparts. The Gulag was not their doing; their Russia was the culture, the scramble for scarce goods, the anecdotes told around vodka in steamy kitchens, the shashlik by a lazy river. Most Russians concentrated on protecting their lives from “them,” as people in the Soviet Union would refer to the leadership and its secret police, a finger pointed to the ceiling, and to survive. Or leave.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine — so cruel, so pointless, so devastating — has changed all this, at least for those not mesmerized by Mr. Putin’s recidivist claptrap. It’s hard not to feel shame at theevidence of Russians killing and raping people who did them no wrong, people who share so much of their history and culture.
And it has become difficult to feel pride in all the things that Russians can genuinely boast about — the great books, the Bolshoi, the hockey stars, the spirituality — when Mr. Putin is dispatching waves of boys to kill and die for his false version of Russia’s manifest destiny and his personal grievances against the West.
This is not necessarily a logical reaction. Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky are not to blame for Mariupol. And most Russians are not directly complicit in Mr. Putin’s malice. But Mr. Putin rose to power pledging to restore greatness to Russia, and the key to that is the desire among ordinary Russians to feel, again, a sense of belonging to a globally respected power. Russians may have been too caught up in Mr. Putin’s chimera to recognize that the seizure of Crimea or the incursions into Donetsk and Luhansk were a precursor of much worse.
When the Russian tanks began their grim parade toward Kyiv on Feb. 24, 2022, Russians, too, were in shock. “We, the Russians living inside and outside of the country, will have to bear the shame of this situation for years to come,” wrote Anastasia Piatakhina Giré, a psychotherapist in Paris, shortly after the invasion. She grew up in the Soviet Union, and many of her patients are displaced Russians. “We can do very little to turn down the volume of this feeling, no matter how many Ukrainian flags we display on our social media feeds or either publicly or privately in our daily lives.”
A year later, another expatriate, Anastasia Edel, the author of “Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution and the New Tsar,” wrote a syndicated column about trying to come to grips with the shame and confusion: “As someone who was shaped by Russian and Soviet literature, I have been made to feel like an unwilling partner to Russian crimes. That is why, since last February, I have abandoned any pretense of being a cultural envoy. I have been an envoy of nothing — just another immigrant who came to America in search of a better life.”
That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come, just as his attempt to quash Ukrainian nationhood has steeled its foundations. We know from the Germans’ postwar history that restoring a battered national identity is a project of decades, maybe more.
In the end, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky will survive, as did Goethe and Bach, and Ukraine will be rebuilt and incorporated more closely in the West. But for Russians and those of us who identify even a little bit as Russian, something elemental has been destroyed, and a lot of painful soul-searching lies ahead.
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
CNN anchor Boris Sanchez came prepared Wednesday during an interview with Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), fact-checking several false claims relating to the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and at one point holding up a blown-up copy of a check that the congressman was referencing to try to make his case.
On CNN News Central, Tiffany called for Biden to be held “accountable,” even as House Republicans have struggled to name any specific illicit actions worthy of impeaching the Democratic president.
When Sanchez asked what specific charges he would like to see brought, Tiffany referenced Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, but declined to mention that the time period he cited came after the elder Biden was vice president—and when he did not hold government office at all.
Tiffany insisted that Biden “has a check in the amount of $40,000 that has his name on it.”
“You’ve got another $200,000 check that came from Jim and Sarah Biden to him,” he said, as Sanchez held up a copy of that very check from 2018.
“Sir, I have that check right here,” Sanchez said, noting the year. “And it actually says that this was a reimbursement. This was a loan repayment from his brother.”
Tiffany then shifted gears.
“So, you can make the case that the Bidens did not do this while Joe Biden was vice president, but I think it’s contrary to record,” he asserted, despite having just been shown the date on the check.
Tiffany then claimed incorrectly that when Biden was vice president, he “called off the prosecutor in Ukraine in regards to the Burisma investigation”—a reference to the Ukrainian energy company that his son Hunter was once a board member on.
“Oh, sir, that has been debunked,” he said. “That prosecutor was unanimously disliked by both Republicans and Democrats. And even EU officials said that he was corrupt and they wanted him out.”
The report tracks what it calls “prolific Russian influence actors” that last summer began focusing on disparaging the 2024 Olympic Games and French President Emmanuel Macron, including by posting a bogus documentary featuring a deepfake of actor Tom Cruise.
“These ongoing Russian influence operations have two central objectives: to denigrate the reputation of the [International Olympic Committee] on the world stage; and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games,” the report says.
“Russia has a decades-long history of undermining the Olympics, but for the Paris Games, we’ve observed this old playbook has been updated with new generative AI tactics, “ said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who directed the study. “They want to scare spectators from attending the Games for fear of physical violence breaking out.”
Most recently, the Russian campaign has sought to capitalize on the Israel-Hamas war by impersonating militants and fabricating threats against Israelis who attending the 2024 Games, the report found. Some images referenced the attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team and a West German police officer.
Munich Olympics 1972 Hostage Crisis (Russel McPhedran / Fairfax Media via Getty Images file)
The fake documentary, posted online last summer, was titled “Olympics Has Fallen,” a play on the 2013 movie “Olympus Has Fallen.” Designed to resemble a Netflix production, it used AI-generated audio resembling Cruise’s voice to imply his participation, the report says, and even attached sham five-star reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the BBC.
YouTube took it down at the behest of the International Olympic Committee, but it remains available on Telegram, Microsoft says.
“The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recently been faced with a number of fake news posts targeting the IOC,” the committee said in a statement last fall, citing “an entire documentary produced with defamatory content, a fake narrative and false information, using an AI-generated voice of a world-renowned Hollywood actor.”
Tom Cruise in
The Russian campaign also put out videos designed to look like news reports that suggested intelligence about credible threats of violence at the Paris Games, Microsoft found.
One video that purported to be a report from media outlet Euronews in Brussels falsely claimed that Parisians were buying property insurance in anticipation of terrorism.
In another spoofed news clip impersonating French broadcaster France 24, the Russian campaign falsely claimed that 24% of purchased tickets for Olympic events had been returned due to fears of terrorism.
A third Russian effort consisted of a fake video news release from the CIA and France’s main intelligence agency warning potential attendees to stay away from the 2024 Olympics due to the alleged risk of a terror attack.
Microsoft says Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has a long history of attacking the Olympics.
“If they cannot participate in or win the Games, then they seek to undercut, defame, and degrade the international competition in the minds of participants, spectators, and global audiences,” the report says. “The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Summer Games held in Los Angeles and sought to influence other countries to do the same.”
At the time, according to Microsoft, U.S. officials linked Soviet actors to a campaign that covertly distributed leaflets to Olympic committees in countries including Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and South Korea, claiming that nonwhite competitors would be targeted by American extremists if they went to Los Angeles.
In 2017, the IOC banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Games after finding widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes.
But the current ban is over the war in Ukraine. The committee decided that qualifying athletes from Russia and close ally Belarus may compete in the 2024 Summer Games only as “individual neutral athletes,” prohibited from flying their national flags.
Microsoft said the online influence campaign picked up shortly afterward.
The Russian Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cowherd, whose nationally syndicated radio show is simulcast on Fox Sports 1, declared as much after Trump was convicted Thursday of 34 felonies in a historic verdict.
“He’s trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” Cowherd said Thursday on his podcast. “I live in a nice neighborhood in L.A. and it’s not … one of those swanky neighborhoods, but I don’t see crime. I’m not stumbling over homeless people.”
“Dodger Stadium’s full, leads Major League Baseball in attendance,” he continued. “Laker games are full. People have money in their pocket.”
Cowherd argued that the picture of “skyrocketing” crime rates Trump often evokes on the campaign trail is nonexistent — and that violent crimes rates have “plummeted coast to coast” since 2023.
The former president responded to Thursday’s verdict by accusing the justice system of being “rigged.” Cowherd said he thinks Trump, who he called a “con-artist,” is now stoking increasing disillusionment among his supporters.
“Donald Trump is now a felon,” Cowherd said. “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade advisor, his foreign policy advisor … they’re all felons.”
The list of Trump’s former team members who’ve been convicted of a crime is expansive. Among them: Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates; his former fixer, Michael Cohen; his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon; his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn; his former trade advisor, Peter Navarro; and his former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.
Trump decried his guilty verdict as “rigged.” Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
“If everybody in your social circle is a felon, I don’t think it’s ‘rigged,’” Cowherd added. “I don’t think the world’s against you. And to get people to agree on anything, 34 counts? Zero for 34? That’s a batting slump even the New York Mets could be impressed with.”
Putin Hints at Bombing Other ‘Densely Populated’ Nations
Allison Quinn – May 28, 2024
Getty Images
Russia’s Vladimir Putin lashed out Tuesday at European countries that are considering giving permission to Ukraine to use their weapons for strikes on Russian territory.
Speaking in Tashkent during a two-day visit to Uzbekistan, Putin warned of “serious consequences” if Western weapons are allowed in attacks on Russian soil.
“In Europe, especially in small countries, they should realize what they are playing with. They should remember that they are countries with small, densely populated territories… This is a factor they should keep in mind before talking about striking Russia,” he said.
His comments came as more and more European leaders expressed support for Ukraine taking the war to Russian territory at a meeting of defense ministers on Tuesday.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said it is “perfectly possible” for Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia and there is “no contradiction” with the laws of war. “You have to balance the risk of escalation and the need for Ukrainians to defend,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse. Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said the Netherlands would not stop Ukraine from attacking targets on Russian territory, and that she hoped “other countries that have different positions will change that.”
Hanno Pevkur, the defense minister of Estonia, said, “It cannot be normal that Russia is attacking from very deep into Ukrainian territory and the Ukrainians are fighting with one hand behind their back.”
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg called on NATO officials to reconsider prohibiting Ukraine from using Western-supplied weapons to strike “legitimate targets” outside the country earlier this week. The Biden administration has repeatedly cautioned against Ukraine using American-made weapons to strike inside Russia, though officials are now reportedly debating whether to change that policy.
2 Yale researchers are pulling back the curtain on Russia’s sanctions-stricken economy — and it’s landed them on a list of Putin’s enemies
Jennifer Sor – May 25, 2024
Jeffery Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian have landed themselves on a list of sanctioned individuals for their work shining a light on Russia’s economic situation.Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik AFP
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two Yale researchers, have issued dire predictions for Russia’s economy.
Their work has landed them on a list of sanctioned individuals in Russia.
In their view, the country’s economy is in shambles, and Putin could end up losing support of the people.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two researchers at the Yale School of Management, have been targeted for their views on Russia’s economy since the war in Ukraine began.
Over the last few years, they’ve found themselves on Vladimir Putin’s watch list for stating what they see as a simple truth: the Russian economy is in trouble, and there’s only so much cherry-picking of the data that can obscure that fact.
Moscow has fiercely defended its vision of a prospering economy, but the evidence speaks for itself, Sonnenfeld and Tian say. Soaring prices and ailing consumer sentiment have hit key sectors in Russia’s economy, and Moscow is paying a huge cost to keep its war machine running.
The nation is in such dire straits that citizens could even start turning on Putin later this year, they predicted, assuming the West continues to supply military and financial aid to Ukraine.
“We can list for you what Putin has concealed – suddenly – the past three years. If his economy was performing at the level he claims, he’d provide the data ad not hide those facts,” Sonnenfeld told Business Insider in an interview. “Putin survives only by cannibalizing Russian businesses – throwing the living room furniture into the furnace to keep the fire burning.”
Jeffrey SonnenfeldCourtesy of Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
The researchers, who met as a professor-student pair at Yale, have received a lot of criticism for their work on Russia, much of it in the form of hate mail and threatening phone calls.
“I’ve had a lot of threats on the phone, and my home has been vandalized,” Sonnenfeld told BI last summer. “Now we have so many security cameras I can’t even have my shirt tails untucked, let alone walk around in my shorts at home.”
Both are barred from entering Russia and were put on the nation’s sanctioned US citizens list in 2022.
Still, neither of them regrets their work.
“We’re pretty excited about it,” they said of their research. “Any of the threats only motivate us to work down much harder.”
Putin’s top critics
Sonnenfeld, 70, and Tian, 25, didn’t plan on getting their names added to a list of Putin’s critics.
Neither are technically economists, but they began researching Russia’s economy while compiling a list of companies that exited or scaled back their operations in Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
That list went viral online, and was instrumental in getting more than 1,000 companies to scale back their business in the country, the Yale School of Management says on its website.
Steven Tian headshot
Steven TianCourtesy of Steven Tian
At that time, Tian and Sonnenfeld began noticing cracks forming in Russia’s economy. Putin has claimed Russia is becoming the new “growth hub” of the world, and the IMF says Russia’s economy is on track to grow over 3% this year, more than any other OECD economy, including the US. But that doesn’t square with data Sonnenfeld and Tian are seeing, with some pockets of the country’s economy in dire shape.
Among their biggest predictions is that the situation in Russia is so bad that the country could eventually turn on Putin, with a shift in the domestic temperament coming as soon as the November US presidential election this year.
That’s because if Biden is re-elected, the US will likely continue supplying aid to Ukraine, forcing Russia to continue spending money and lives to keep waging war on Ukraine.
“Putin has no grand strategy other than to hope Trump wins and cuts a favorable deal with Russia,” Tian said. “Russia is in for a world of economic pain for a long time to come.”
Positive forecasts on Russia’s economy are based on a lack of visibility, Sonnenfeld and Tian say.
The pair began working together when Tian was an undergraduate at Yale, chasing Sonnenfeld around lecture halls. Eventually, Sonnenfeld became Tian’s advisor and has mentored Tian for over eight years.
The two researchers are still working on ways to urge the West to tighten and enforce sanctions on Russia. They also continue to update their list of companies that have exited the country in the hope that it will encourage more firms to do the same.
Colleagues describe Sonnenfeld as opinionated but generous and charismatic. Tian, meanwhile, has a near-photographic memory and is a highly analytical thinker, colleagues mentioned.
“Steven does a lot of the analytic heavy lifting, and I do the flamboyant color,” Sonnenfeld said of their work together.
People who have worked with them also say the pair is extremely passionate about their work, and both are often known to answer emails at all hours of the night and early morning.
“We don’t believe in regular sleep patterns,” Sonnenfeld added. “Actually, we know it’s very important, but sometimes when there’s a sense of urgency, we do seriously dive into the crisis du jour. We just don’t like bullies, whether or not it’s Putin or some other bravado.”
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries may be proving the Biden Administration wrong, experts say
Nathan Rennolds – May 11, 2024
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries may be proving the Biden Administration wrong, experts say
Ukraine has been targeting Russian oil refineries in recent months.
The Biden Administration has criticized the strikes, warning of global energy price rises.
However, some experts say Ukraine should continue the attacks. Here’s why.
Ukraine has been ramping up attacks on Russian oil refineries in recent months as it seeks to hamper Russian export revenues and curtail fuel supplies to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces.
In one of the latest attacks, Ukrainian drones struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Kaluga region, setting it on fire, the RIA state news agency reported on Friday, per Reuters.
Ukraine also hit Gazprom’s Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery, one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, earlier this week, Radiy Khabirov, the head of Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan, said in a post on Telegram.
However, the Biden Administration has previously slammed such tactics, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin saying in April that it risked impacting global energy markets and urging Ukraine to shift its focus onto military targets.
“Those attacks could have a knock-on effect in terms of the global energy situation,” Austin said. “Quite frankly, I think Ukraine is better served by going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight.”
But some experts believe such criticism is misguided.
Writing for Foreign Affairs magazine, Michael Liebreich, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and Sam Winter-Levy, a doctoral candidate in political science at Princeton University, argued that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining facilities would not lead to spikes in global energy prices.
The experts said that Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries would only hinder Russia’s ability to turn its oil into refined products such as gasoline and would not impact the volume of oil it can extract or export.
“In fact, with less domestic refining capacity, Russia will be forced to export more of its crude oil, not less, pushing global prices down rather than up,” they added.
And such strikes will likely continue to affect those within Russia, where prices for refined products like gas or diesel are soaring — meaning Ukraine’s attacks are achieving the aims of failed Western economic sanctions, they continued.
The West has attempted to impose a number of sanctions on Russia to limit its income from energy, with the US and the UK banning Russian oil and gas and G7 leaders agreeing to set a price cap on Russian crude oil at $60 per barrel.
But Russia has largely managed to get around such measures, with its Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak, saying in December last year that Russia had shifted almost all of its oil exports to China and India.
Its total oil and gas revenue for the month hit 1.23 trillion rubles, up almost 90% from April last year, per the report.
Reuters reported in April that Russia also appeared to be able to quickly repair some of the key refining facilities affected by Ukrainian strikes, reducing impacted capacity to roughly 10% from nearly 14% at the end of March, per the agency’s calculations.
Ukraine has since launched a series of new attacks on refining sites, however, and it is as yet unclear how these have affected Russia’s repair efforts.
No issue in U.S. politics is more contentious right now than the situation at America’s southern border.
Since President Biden took office in 2021 and reversed some of former President Donald Trump’s hard-line restrictions, illegal crossings have surged to a record high of more than 2 million per year, on average.
Democrats and other defenders of Biden’s record say the causes are complicated and predate his presidency: foreign violence, economic hardship and cartels that profit from crossings.
Republicans and other Biden critics argue that the president has effectively encouraged migrants to try their luck by using immigration parole at a historic scale and ordering a pause on most U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations.
But how could the differences between Biden and Trump reshape U.S. border policy going forward?
November’s election will be the first since 1892 to feature two presidents — one former, one current — competing as the major-party nominees. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.
Here’s what Biden and Trump have done so far about the border — and what they plan to do next.
Part two in an ongoing series. Read part one: Abortion.
Where they’re coming from
Trump: More than anything else, Trump built his political following on a hard-line approach to immigration.
Starting in 2011, Trump boosted his profile on the right by positioning himself as the leading proponent of the false conspiracy theory that then-President Barack Obama — whose father was from Kenya — wasn’t born in Hawaii as stated on his birth certificate. In 2016, Trump finally admitted that so-called birthers (those who believe Obama isn’t a native-born citizen) were wrong and that “Obama was born in the United States.”
Trump spent much of 2016 vowing to build a physical wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico — possibly fortified with spikes, electricity and an alligator moat — and make Mexico pay for it.
According to the New York Times, “the idea [of a border wall] was initially suggested by a Trump campaign aide … as a memory aid to prompt the candidate to remember to talk about immigration in his speeches. But it soon became a rallying cry at his events.”
“You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving,” Trump told the Times editorial board, “I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ And they go nuts.”
Mexican immigrants weren’t the only ones in Trump’s crosshairs. In late 2015, after domestic terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook (a U.S. citizen born in Chicago) and his wife, Tashfeen Malik (a native of Pakistan who’d lived in the U.S. for years), killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Around the same time, Trump said he would create a “deportation force” that would expel millions of unauthorized immigrants. “We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally,” he claimed during one primary debate. “They will go out.”
Biden: Biden entered the 2020 Democratic presidential primary under pressure from the left on immigration.
As Obama’s vice president, Biden could claim partial credit for 2012’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shielded from deportation about 700,000 immigrants (known as Dreamers) who were brought to the country as children.
“[Obama’s] title of deporter in chief was earned,” Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said at the time.
As a result, Biden sought to mend ties to Latino voters by calling Obama’s deportation approach a “big mistake” and pledging to reverse Trump’s border policies — while making DACA permanent and providing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.
“We’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in his acceptance speech at 2020’s “virtual” Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.”
What they’ve done as president
Trump: During his four years in office, Trump issued more than 400 executive actions on immigration.
The changes started almost immediately. On Jan. 27, 2017, Trump signed an order seeking to block travelers from seven majority Muslim countries for 90 days while suspending refugee resettlement and prohibiting Syrian refugees indefinitely. Challenged in court, the administration issued revised travel bans as time went on, removing or adding certain countries.
Trump quickly zeroed in on his signature border wall as well. But Congress refused to meet his funding demands, sparking a lengthy government shutdown. Ultimately, Trump managed to build just 458 miles of barrier along the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border — nearly all of them in areas where older barriers already stood.
Mexico did not pay for any of Trump’s border wall.
Frustrated with the continued crush of illegal border crossings, Trump green-lit a plan in 2018 to separate migrant children from their parents or caregivers at the border and then criminally prosecute the adults. Trump eventually ended his “family separation” policy — but only after images of crying, traumatized kids detained in crowded facilities sparked a national outcry.
Despite Trump’s vow to expel “millions” of immigrants, deportations by ICE officers — who were given broad latitude to go after anyone without legal status — averaged just 80,000 per year during his presidency (significantly lower than the annual rate under Obama).
Why? Trump supporters and critics largely agree that the former president’s strict policies — including narrowing who is eligible for asylum; making it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; rolling back DACA; and forcing Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed — “deterred” some migrants from even trying to cross the border.
But while Trump’s supporters described this as deterrence through strength, Trump’s critics called it deterrence through cruelty.
In March 2020, Trump implemented the emergency health authority known as Title 42, which allowed border officials to rapidly turn away asylum seekers on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19 — without giving them a chance to appeal for U.S. protection.
Biden: Biden vowed to reverse Trump’s immigration policies on “day one” of his administration — and it’s a promise he largely kept.
In early 2021, the new president halted construction of the border wall; ended his predecessor’s travel bans; created a task force to reunify migrant families separated under Trump; reinstated DACA; ended Title 42 expulsions for unaccompanied minors; and ordered a pause on most ICE arrests and deportations, issuing new guidelines directing officers to prioritize national security threats, serious criminals and recent border crossers.
At the same time, Biden warned that without more funding and stronger “guardrails,” such as additional asylum judges, the U.S. could “end up with 2 million people on our border” and “a crisis on our hands that complicates what we’re trying to do.”
“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on day one,” said Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser. “It will not.”
Initially, Biden kept Title 42 in place (until May 2023), expelling five times more border crossers than Trump did (in large part because more migrants were trying to cross the border illegally).
As a result, national surveys show that voters are unhappy about the border situation and prefer Republicans to handle it. A February Gallup survey found that nearly 20% of those who disapproved of Biden’s job performance cited “illegal immigration/open borders” as the biggest reason — more than any other issue.
What they want to do next
Trump: More of the same — with the emphasis on more.ADVERTISEMENT
Among the ramped-up policies Trump is reportedly planning, according to the New York Times:
“round[ing] up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain[ing] them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled”
reviving his Muslim travel ban and his COVID-era Title 42 restrictions on the basis “that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis”
and “scour[ing] the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport[ing] people by the millions per year” by redirecting military funds and deploying federal agents, local police officers and National Guard soldiers to help ICE.
In an April interview with Time magazine, Trump confirmed that he is plotting “a massive deportation of people” using “local law enforcement” and the National Guard — and “if they weren’t able to,” he added, “then I’d use [other parts of] the military.”
He also refused to “rule out” detention camps, saying “it’s possible that we’ll do it to an extent.”
His inspiration, he has said, is the “Eisenhower model” — a reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 campaign, known by the ethnic slur “Operation Wetback,” to round up and expel Mexican immigrants in what amounted to a nationwide “show me your papers” rule.
Trump has also said he would suspend refugee resettlement, revive his “Remain in Mexico” policy and end DACA. He has even left the door open to resuming “zero tolerance” family separations.
Biden: Most Democrats spent 2023 avoiding border politics while privately fretting about how the issue might affect the 2024 election. But the president finally bowed to GOP pressure last fall, agreeing to bipartisan border talks; the hope was that “a deal might take the issue off the table for his reelection campaign,” according to the New York Times.
In January, Senate negotiators actually struck a $20 billion bipartisan deal — a deal that gave the GOP much of what it had asked for, including provisions that would restrict claims for parole, raise the bar for asylum, speed the expulsion of migrants and automatically shutter the border if attempted illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold.
But Trump balked — and following his lead, Republicans on Capitol Hill effectively doomed the legislation.
“We can fight about the border — or we can fix it,” Biden said during his State of the Union address. “I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now.”
In lieu of legislation, Biden is also considering using the same section of the federal code behind Trump’s most controversial actions, known as 212(f), to issue a “nuclear” executive order that would unilaterally crack down on migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the border after crossing illegally — but that would also risk legal challenges and left-wing backlash.
“Some are suggesting that I should just go ahead and try it,” Biden said in a recent interview with Univision. “And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court.”
