While some Wall Street billionaires While they openly support Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, most top executives at publicly traded companies are a different story, according to Terry Haines, founder of Pangea Policy.
The former president’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury will lead to a “measurable but small trickle, trickle, trickle away from Trump” among the overall electorate, he said. Bloomberg TV on Friday after telling clients it will also become harder to attract serious financial and political support on Wall Street.
That’s despite the fact that billionaires like Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Miriam Adelson supported Trump, while Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman decried the hush money lawsuit and reportedly leaning toward supporting Trump at.
But Haines drew a distinction between such billionaires and the heads of most other large, public companies.
“If you’re looking at the average Fortune 500 CEO or C-suite who is accountable to shareholders, they’re going to be very careful about how they put themselves forward, or whether they put themselves forward at all. places,” he said. “I mean, they don’t want to risk public backlash for supporting Trump, I guess.”
Meanwhile, the conviction has sparked a fundraising wave, with the Republican Party’s WinRed platform briefly collapsing Thursday under pressure from grassroots donors. On Friday evening, the Trump campaign said it had raised nearly $53 million in the 24 hours after the verdict, setting a new Republican record and narrowing the fundraising gap with President Joe Biden.
Trump is expected to be sentenced on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee on July 14.
Regardless of what punishment Trump receives, Haines expects the convention “will be brought forward at a very high level,” which could help energize the Republican base.
“But I think this will turn off a lot of the independents that Trump needs to win the general election,” he added. “I think that could be a problem for him.”
