CEOs weren’t too pleased with Donald Trump’s performance at a private meeting in Washington this week, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin said on Friday.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee addressed top business leaders and spoke about the corporate tax rate at Thursday’s gathering, which featured Walmart’s Doug McMillon, Apple’s Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.
A number of CEOs “walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish” but left it thinking that he was “remarkably meandering,” Sorkin said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“[He] could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map,” Sorkin recalled hearing from attendees. “These were people who I think might’ve been actually predisposed to him and actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him.”
One CEO reportedly said that the former president didn’t outline how he hopes to achieve his policy proposals, while at least two people in the meeting described Trump’s energy as being subdued, according to CNBC.
In a separate appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sorkin said that CEOs felt “a bit disheartened” after the gathering.
“[They were] a bit questioning — I don’t want to say his mental fitness, but questioning just how meandering, how ... he could not keep a thought straight, he would go in one direction and then he’d go in another direction, and that there wasn’t really necessarily a through line to the way he spoke or what even he was talking about,” Sorkin said.
Trump reportedly discussed his desire to reduce the corporate tax rate from its current 21% to 20%, saying that he preferred the latter since it’s a “round number.”
“I think that that unto itself had a number of CEOs shaking their head, given that 1% of the total tax burden on the country is actually a huge number in terms of what is needed to support the revenue for this country,” Sorkin said.
Meanwhile, Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump’s 2024 campaign, has told the media that the former president was “warmly received by everyone in the room” and “commended for his policy proposals on deregulation and tax cuts.”