Corporate chiefs keep an ear tuned to Trump's messages

It started with Carrier. Ford was next. So by the time Donald J Trump singled out Boeing for a Twitter taunt on Tuesday, corporate executives across America had read the writing on the wall: It was time to hunker down.

Initially aiming to pressure companies like Ford and Carrier to keep factory jobs at home instead of moving them to Mexico, Trump has upped the ante in recent weeks, forcefully reminding business leaders of his campaign vows to impose painful tariffs on companies that ignore him.

Fresh off a deal intended to keep roughly 1,000 Carrier jobs in Indianapolis, Trump took aim at Boeing on Tuesday with a complaint that it was overcharging the government on a potential $4 billion contract to replace Air Force One. “Cancel order!” he wrote in a Twitter message.

Unlike the earlier factory-focused attacks, Boeing's turn as a target of Trump's ire caught big business off guard, especially since Boeing is among the bluest of the blue chips and is not just a substantial employer in the United States but the single largest American exporter.

For all of Trump's theatrics, the fear in the executive suites of ending up in the cross-hairs of the president-elect is real, according to Bill George, a former chief executive of Medtronic, a large medical equipment maker based in Minneapolis with over $30 billion in global revenues.

And it is not just those who do a lot of business with the government. More broadly, the country's chief executives find themselves in an unusual and unexpected position with an incoming Republican administration — on the defensive. And whether they like it or not, current and former business leaders said Trump's Twitter messages and other statements will filter through corner offices and boardrooms and influence decision making.

“Not that they didn't think about it before, but CEOs are going to think harder about the consequences for the economy of moving jobs overseas,” said Kevin Sharer, who ran biotech giant Amgen for more than a decade beginning in 2000 and has served on the boards of Chevron, 3M and Northrop Grumman. “What the president-elect is trying to do,” he said, is send the message “that his priority is jobs and the economy.”

But Sharer said Trump's methods so far are limited and relatively easy for big business to accommodate. 

“This is a very, very minor move,” he said, referring to how United Technologies, Carrier's parent, agreed last week to keep roughly 1,000 jobs in Indiana from moving to Mexico following pressure from Trump. “If a new president says please don't, it's a no-brainer.”

Blair Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners, a leading independent investment bank in New York, echoed Sharer's analysis.

“All in all, this is probably more important in terms of symbolic impact than it is in terms of substance,” said Effron, a prominent Wall Street Democrat who strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president. “But symbols matter.”

Trump's targets are not just chief executives. On Wednesday evening, he went on Twitter to fire at Chuck Jones, the president of Local 1999 of the United Steelworkers in Indianapolis, which represents Carrier employees working at the Indiana plant, saying Jones “has done a terrible job representing workers.”

© 2016 The New York Times News Service