[ad_1]
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 CEOs, from companies as large as Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson and Walmart, agreed to Zoom’s emergency meeting on the morning of Nov.6, just hours after Trump said the night before that he had won multiple states that they had voted. for Mr. Biden.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale management professor who organized the 7 a.m. call, declined to comment on Schwarzman’s comments, but three participants said the Blackstone founder disagreed with suggestions made during the meeting that the United States could be on the verge of a hit.
Schwarzman, a Republican donor who has been one of Trump’s most energetic supporters on Wall Street, sought to allay those fears, saying the president was within his right to question the election results and predicting that the legal process would run its course. .
He asked if other participants were not surprised that the first votes in Pennsylvania favored Trump, only for later counts to tip the state in favor of Biden.
Schwarzman said there had been news reports that the ballots kept coming days after the elections and that some of them may not have been real – problems, he said, that needed to be resolved by the courts, as the legal team of the President.
Call participants said that Philadelphia-based Comcast CEO Brian Roberts responded by explaining that the Republican-led state legislature had prevented mail-in votes from being counted before Election Day, and that votes Philadelphia, one of the last parts of the state to report its account, had traditionally favored Democrats.
When asked about Schwarzman’s comments, Blackstone told the Financial Times: “As an American, Steve believes that the electoral system is robust and that the democratic process will run in an orderly and legal manner, as it has throughout the history of our nation. “
Schwarzman donated $ 3 million to America First Action, a Trump-aligned super-political action committee, in January, but support for Republicans on the negative vote accounted for most of the $ 30 million he has contributed to political causes this year. .
The CEO’s call concluded with the resolution of many of the business leaders to congratulate Biden and encourage Republican leaders in Congress to back his election victory in hopes of encouraging a smooth transfer of power.
The call was followed by statements from individual CEOs and various US industry groups. The Business Roundtable deliberately said it respected the Trump campaign’s right to request investigations into alleged wrongdoing, but saw “no indication that any of them would change the outcome.”
Professor Sonnenfeld said the anxiety of business leaders had subsided since he “shot over the arc” as several of the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to results had failed. Some CEOs on the call had lobbied for the group to reconvene, he said, but “they feel like they’ve said enough and it’s getting back to normal.”
The November 6 session opened on a dark note, with a warning about the possibility of a “coup” from Tim Snyder, the Yale historian and author of About tyranny, who told business leaders that democracies are almost always toppled from within.
“To defeat a coup, the early response of opinion leaders, including business leaders, is very important. Even if you think what Trump is doing is not going to work, it is very important not to wait to see how others respond, ”Professor Snyder told the group, according to Professor Sonnenfeld.
“Some thought it was exaggerating,” Professor Sonnenfeld told the FT, but said many CEOs had been “alarmed” by the president’s speech and Professor Snyder’s warning left them determined to speak.
“There was great concern about the president’s words and the national reaction, which was causing more division in the country instead of less. Neither wants a divided nation. They don’t want fractured communities. They don’t want hostile workplaces. ”
