Financial Times, Nov. 14, 2020
Schwarzman defended Trump at CEO meeting on election results
Exclusive: Blackstone founder dismissed ‘coup’ fears and predicted legal
process would take its course
by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Mark Vandevelde in New York
Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman defended Donald Trump’s response
to this year’s US poll results during an emergency meeting of senior
business leaders alarmed by the president’s claims that the election is
being stolen, according to several participants.
About 30 chief executives — of companies as large as Goldman Sachs,
Johnson & Johnson and Walmart — agreed to the emergency Zoom meeting on
the morning of November 6, only hours after Mr Trump said the night
before that he had won several states that had voted for Mr Biden.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale management professor who organised the 7am
call, declined to comment on Mr Schwarzman’s remarks, but three
participants said the Blackstone founder took issue with suggestions
made during the meeting that the US could be on the verge of a coup.
Mr Schwarzman, a Republican donor who has been one of Mr Trump’s most
energetic supporters on Wall Street, sought to assuage such fears,
saying the president was within his rights to challenge election results
and predicting that the legal process would take its course.
He asked whether other participants did not find it surprising that
early votes in Pennsylvania had favoured Mr Trump, only for later counts
to tip the state in Mr Biden’s favour.
Mr Schwarzman said there had been news reports stating that ballots
continued arriving days after the election and that some of them may not
have been real — issues, he said, that needed to be resolved by the
courts, as the president’s legal team has argued.
There was great concern about the president’s words and the national
reaction, that it was leading to more cleavage in the country rather
than less
Participants in the call said Brian Roberts, Comcast’s
Philadelphia-based chief executive, responded by explaining that the
state’s Republican-led legislature had prevented mailed-in votes from
being counted before election day, and that votes from Philadelphia, one
of the later parts of the state to report its tally, had traditionally
favoured Democrats.
Asked about Mr Schwarzman’s remarks, Blackstone told the Financial
Times: “As an American, Steve believes the electoral system is sound and
that the democratic process will play out in an orderly and legal
manner, as it has throughout our nation’s history.”
Mr Schwarzman donated $3m to America First Action, a super-political
action committee aligned with Mr Trump, in January, but support for
down-ballot Republicans accounted for most of the $30m he has
contributed to political causes this year.
The CEO call concluded with many of the business leaders resolving to
extend congratulations to Mr Biden and encourage Republican
congressional leaders to endorse his election victory in the hope of
encouraging a smooth transfer of power.
The call was followed by statements from a few individual chief
executives and several US industry groups. The Business Roundtable
pointedly said it respected the Trump campaign’s right to call for
investigations of alleged irregularities but saw “no indication that any
of these would change the outcome”.
Prof Sonnenfeld said the anxiety of business leaders had eased since
that “shot across the bow” as several of the Trump campaign’s legal
challenges to the results had failed. Some CEOs on the call had pushed
for the group to reconvene, he said, but “they feel they’ve said enough
and it’s getting back on track”.
US officials affirm vote ‘integrity’ as Republican resistance to Biden
win cracks
The session on November 6 had opened on a dark note, with a warning
about the possibility of a “coup d’état” from Tim Snyder, the Yale
historian and author of On Tyranny, who told the business leaders that
democracies were almost always overthrown from the inside.
“To defeat a coup d’état, the early response of thought leaders,
including of business leaders, is very important. Even if you think what
Mr Trump is doing is not going to work, it is very important not to just
wait around to see how others respond,” Prof Snyder told the group,
according to Prof Sonnenfeld.
“Some thought that was overstating it,” Prof Sonnenfeld told the FT, but
he said many CEOs had been “alarmed” by the president’s address and Prof
Snyder’s warning left them resolved to speak up.
“There was great concern about the president’s words and the national
reaction, that it was leading to more cleavage in the country rather
than less. None of them wants a divided nation. They don’t want
fractured communities. They don’t want hostile workplaces.”
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