No Way to Run a Railroad

I’m a capitalist. I retired at a relatively young age because I benefited from the prosperity that comes from a free economy built on companies exercising their autonomy, largely free from government interference.    

In my more than 25 years in business managing corporate communications for some of the world’s biggest brands, I didn’t think much about what any president thought about the companies I worked for, because it didn’t matter.    

Sure, my CEO bosses and I had to sort out the shifting political winds to adjust our business strategies to the latest administration, but we were largely free to run our businesses in the best interests of our shareholders, customers, and employees, albeit within the constraints of government regulations, which admittedly were at times burdensome.    

We could hire and fire whom we wished and invest where we wished based on our long-term vision, not the grievances of any president. 

President Trump’s efforts to meddle in American companies’ businesses is an affront to the concept of free markets and capitalism, the latest example being his calling for Microsoft to fire its chief of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, this past week. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the president posted on his Truth Social site that Microsoft should “immediately terminate the employment of Lisa Monaco” because of “security concerns” arising from her prior role as Deputy Attorney General under Biden.    

I didn’t know squat about Monaco till I saw the Journal story. According to the paper, she previously worked for Andrew Weissman, a member of Robert Mueller’s investigative team looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

The president posted that “she is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government. Because of Monaco’s wrongful acts, the U.S. Government recently stripped her of all Security Clearances, took away all of her access to National Security Intelligence, and banned her from all Federal Properties.” 

Can we all please be honest here? Monaco’s clearances and access were stripped by the president himself, along with others, because of his gripes with the Biden Department of Justice, which, however valid those gripes might be, aren’t an excuse for him telling an American business how to run itself. 

And if we really want to make this an argument about national security, perhaps we should look closer at the president’s proposed deal to keep TikTok alive in the U.S., a deal that China still hasn’t approved. The tentative agreement presents more questions than answers when it comes to who will actually run the company and how it will avoid using the data it gathers as “a propaganda weapon,” as Vice President Vance described the company’s past actions. 

And let’s not forget the billions of dollars in contracts that Elon Musk’s companies have with the federal government. 

No. This isn’t about national security or federal contracts. It’s about retribution, score settling, and leveraging federal power to jawbone and coerce a public company. 

Our president is doing the same across many of our country’s governance systems and norms, but his efforts to upend the basic tenets of capitalism through government intervention should alarm every conservative. 

I wake up every day thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have to deal with this situation as a condition of my livelihood, but am worried about all my friends and colleagues in the corporate world who do.It’s got to be a nightmare opening up email every morning if you’re leading a major company, wondering how and if your president will, on a revenge-laden whim, completely disrupt your ability to sell and profit.   

As the old saying goes... is this any way to run a railroad? No. It’s not.