When Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017, major companies—including tech giants Apple, Amazon, and Google—were quick to criticize the move. Elon Musk stepped down from his role on the president’s advisory committees in response. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the decision was “bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.”
What happened this year was very different: Trump ordered the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement, again, on his first day in office. Zuckerberg, who was getting ready to co-host an inaugural ball for the president, didn’t comment on the news. (In an unrelated Facebook post that came shortly after Trump’s announcement about the Paris Agreement, Zuckerberg said he was “Optimistic and celebrating.”) Jeff Bezos, who previously criticized Trump and poured $10 billion into climate nonprofits, has now cozied up to the president. Other tech CEOs sat in support at the inauguration and donated millions to Trump’s inaugural committee.
It’s one example of the business world’s reluctance to take any public stand against the current president. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said at a press conference in December when he talked about meeting with tech leaders. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”
Whether out of a fear of retribution and/or a belief that their companies could benefit directly from Trump, most business leaders are staying quiet. That’s true both for specific policy, like the Paris Agreement, and as the new administration veers toward authoritarianism. The muted response—not to mention the fact that some executives are embracing Trump and voluntarily ditching programs like diversity, equity, and inclusion—isn’t dissimilar to what happened when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
“The parallels of corporate conformity and subservience are quite strong,” says Peter Hayes, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author of a new book, Profits & Persecution, about how companies responded to and collaborated with the Nazi party.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, few took him seriously. As with Trump, people tended to underestimate the threat he posed. “A lot of people thought Hitler was a blowhard,” Hayes says. “He never had been to university. He’d never held a government position. He’d never had a real job in his life, aside from running messages behind enemy lines in World War I. They just didn’t take him seriously. And the antisemitism, only the worst people took that seriously—the people who believed in it took it totally seriously. Everybody else tended to sort of say, ‘Well, you know, if it comes, it’ll stop short of the kind of people I know.’”
At the time, business leaders liked some aspects of the Nazi platform, including its willingness to dismantle labor unions. Those who objected to Hitler’s antisemitism thought that it could be moderated. (In the culture of the time, many Germans were antisemitic themselves—and had especially objectionable views about Jewish immigrants who had recently moved from Eastern Europe—but didn’t think that their Jewish colleagues should lose their jobs or, later, their lives.)
But businesses quickly became participants in the “de-Jewification” (“Entjudung”) of their corporate boards. Some of that was driven by fear, after seeing examples of what the Nazis were willing to do. In one case, the new government arrested the editors of a newspaper in Munich and appointed Nazi replacements who fired Jewish employees. The Nazis intimidated Bosch’s CEO by arresting one of his friends. A cigarette magnate was threatened with the takeover of his property and a trial on corruption charges if he didn’t do what the government wanted.
“They always were willing to use force, but they treated it as a last resort towards the corporate world,” Hayes says. “Because you can intimidate ordinary middle-class or upper-class people pretty easily. And they did. People conform.”
After seeing what was happening to others, some companies started to practice “anticipatory compliance,” including Deutsche Bank, which fired Jewish members of its board before it was forced to. (In the long term, it didn’t help: Two of the bank’s directors were executed later in the war because they’d criticized Hitler.) As Hitler’s regime progressed, the corporate compliance became more horrific: seizing Jewish-owned businesses and property, using forced Jewish labor, and providing, in the case of a chemical company called IG Farben, the poison gas used to kill millions of people in concentration camps.
Some companies fully embraced Nazi propaganda; others were just afraid to resist. Now, as corporate leaders fail to stand up for things they’ve advocated for in the past, such as climate action, what happened in Germany “is kind of a road map for what we’re experiencing,” Hayes says.
The country is at a pivotal moment. The White House is seizing power in unprecedented ways, such as freezing funding that was already appropriated by Congress. Trump broke the law to fire inspectors general at federal agencies. Under Elon Musk, who was never elected to any office, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has started slashing jobs and funding at federal agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The job cuts include accidentally firing workers responsible for nuclear security and researching the bird flu outbreak.)
Musk and other Republicans have threatened judges with impeachment for blocking DOGE work that the judges say is illegal. When Musk sat in at a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump threatened to throw out anyone who objected to Musk. The White House is starting to control which journalists can be part of the press pool covering the president, something that used to happen through an independent committee. The list goes on.
Hayes argues that American business leaders have caved to Trump even without the same type of intimidation that happened in Germany. But there has been some pressure: Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg if he “interfered” with the 2024 election, for example, and then credited his own threats with forcing Zuckerberg to make changes to Meta, including ditching fact-checkers.
Some of the pressure on CEOs, along with politicians and other public figures, now comes in other forms, including the fact that Trump can easily incite his online followers to violence. “We have on record Republican senators who’ve said to their Democratic colleagues, ‘I can’t speak up because I’m afraid for my family,’” Hayes says, adding that corporate leaders may also be afraid to talk because they’re worried about losing their jobs. “This is the normal form of human self-protection that dictatorial and authoritarian forces totally exploit.”
Hayes points out other parallels to Nazi Germany. Hitler, like Trump, didn’t worry about long-term impacts to the economy. Hitler wanted Germany to be self-sufficient, and pushed for companies to make gasoline from coal, even though it was far more expensive than importing fuel from other countries. Similarly, Trump is trying to prop up fossil fuel companies in the U.S. at a time when the rest of the world is moving to electric vehicles—and EVs ultimately make more economic sense.
“We’re giving up the future to serve the fossil fuel industry in the short term, and to try to make us an island in the world,” Hayes says. “It’s not going to work. The bill will come due. And as it starts to come due, everything that Trump has ever done indicates that he will blame someone else. And that’s when this government will become truly dangerous.”
In Germany, Hayes says, the first year of Hitler’s rule was the critical moment that businesses could have made different choices. In theory, it’s not too late for companies—along with the rest of society—to become more vocal now. Hayes, however, doesn’t believe that salvation is likely to come from the corporate sector, warning, “Don’t expect them to stand up to this.”
No comments