White House loyalty rating for companies

Careful, making this kind of statement publicly might hurt your loyalty rating.

I'm familiar with at least one company where the execs are downright excited about the new way of doing business. No longer do you have to carefully study laws and regulations, you just have to make sure one guy likes you! It's a nice deal if you can get it, which is why I'm so aggressive about saying that the people who are getting it need to go to prison when constitutional governance is restored.

Why? Tech has plenty of win at all costs people. Some of the most prominent people who openly don't believe in democracy are tech people.

Democratic leaders haven't been good stewards of our country so we're finding other ideas now.

Just Devil's Advocate, but this being the US, the opposition doesn't necessarily support pure democratic ideals either.

It's just that the conservatives are so much further along the authoritarianism scale that the liberals appear to be freedom loving democracy activists by comparison. But I guarantee you, if you were to drop the average US Democratic party politician into Germany, Australia, or Canada, they'd be considered to be so far right of center that people would question whether or not that politician even believes in democracy.

Transactional at best. Not sly mob-leader transactional, but toddler transactional.

Edit: to his own detriment. Why bother with "deals" when you know it can change at any moment. Just put on a golden dog and pony show for the King and hope for the best.

I suppose the charitable interpretation is that Trump favors transactions that offer short-term benefits to the country, rather than America’s traditional investments into long-term goals that tend to be more nebulous (“soft power” etc.)

Of course, one look at Trump’s actual transactions in office should dissuade of that notion. After he made the preliminary trade deal with the EU, he bragged on TV that Europeans are investing $600 billion and Trump himself gets to decide where the money goes. It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works, but he clearly thinks the point of these transactions is to get more power and wealth for himself.

> I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029

That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.

I doubt anyone will care about this in four years. Society grows accustomed to daily life, as with the Vichy. The job market will be in tatters, similar to what South Africa has now with 40% unemployment. Every time a homeless person steals copper wire from a street lamp in LA, they make $50 from illegal recyclers and it costs taxpayers $10k to fix. $20 million per year, $100 million since 2020. 2029 there will be crime drones swarming LA recording crimes and seeking overly tanned people in real time on YouTube. LA took out a $1 billion loan this year to keep the lights on, and now Denver wants to do the same with zero economic prospects, which is a weird sales pitch.

Trying to give something more power because you think it likes power is generally considered risky

https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1849951974944313590?lang...

> "unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029"

I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Getty... ("Donald Trump speaks behind an engraved glass disc gifted to him by Apple CEO Tim Cook during an event in the Oval Office of the White House")

>If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor.

This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.

When the reckoning finally arrives the aristocrats will forgive themselves in the spirit of reconciliation and moving on, just like they did after WWII. Plenty of American companies like IBM made tons of money helping the Nazis and then after Berlin fell it turned out they were actually always on the side of freedom and there is absolutely no need to expand the war crimes trials to include collaborators.

So in your definition that makes China fascists, considering all its big corporations are merged with the government?

I'd say it's the nature of power, politics and the existence of government. They start out small and then grow and attract corruption. You can only slow it down by having things like democracy (especially direct democracy) and separation of power.

It's pathetic how many people just shrug their shoulders at it and let it happen. The president is a corrupt clown, and people delude themselves into accepting it so they can line their pockets as well.

Yes—more broadly, this is totalitarianism. [0] Every CEO on this list should loudly denounce it and call it out for what it is.

  [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

I don’t like it but it’s not the first time. FDR’s National Recovery Administration crossed similar boundaries.

Unfortunately the executive branch has a lot of power, and many opposed to these wild moves are fearful that openly speaking out will lead to retaliation. Witness the revocation of grant money at targeted universities, for example. Also consider how tariffs are applied and un-applied at moment’s notice.

The only way out that I see is for the executive branch to eventually overplay its hand and anger enough MAGA voters to risk losing the House and perhaps the Senate, thus opening the door for the opposition to have the numbers to block legislation and even threaten impeachment over egregious violations of the Constitution.

I have very strong (and cynical) opinions on why people run companies do this but I was told posting it has made me unemployable so I’ll keep the spicier ones to myself.

I think a lot of it comes down to motivations. The people running these companies have very little to gain from acting ethically and a lot to lose.

> why has no CEO of any, even medium sized, company come out and just said "fuck this, fuck you, fuck 33% of voters, we'll continue to try to operate like a normal country in our little corner"

Because they’re the puppetmasters

    > Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.

And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?

I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.

IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.

Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.

Such is dialectics, but if you are going to apply relativism to comparatively very different movements you are in for a really bad time.

I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.

I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.

Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.

> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:

- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons

etc etc etc

> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"

"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.

> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.

This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.

The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.

>I don't think this is any different from lobby groups

for starter, lobby groups cannot issue executive orders just start and stop tariffs and government grant willy nilly

Lobby groups are private actors rating elected Congressional reps. This is government officials rating private actors (with an implied threat to punish those who don’t comply).

> It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.

Is it? Will it remain so? Things sometimes are until they aren't and the difference is sometimes impossible to distinguish. Better not to give fascism the benefit of the doubt it doesn't deserve.

I don't think "transactional" is the right word at all. There's no durable deal you can make with the government that will stop them from demanding more. The President's open, explicitly stated position is that the American economy belongs to him, and you have no right to conduct your business in a way he doesn't like.

There is never any purpose for a government rating people/organizations on an axis except to act on that information in some way, and there is basically no way that the government acting on ratings of loyalty to the present leadership, is not, at a minimum, a dangerous promotion of private interest above piblic interest.

Its fascist, though, only in the context of other actions by the administration.

The administration's vindictiveness and obsession with loyalty is extreme (for the US).

John Adams: "I see a new nation ready to take its place in the world; not an empire, but a republic; and a republic of laws, not men."

> Can someone explain to me why it's facist that the government is recording who is cooperative and who isn't?

Because your experience with the government in a democracy shouldn't be dependent on whether the person in power decides you have shown sufficient fealty.

> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.

Like they have so far?

> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.

You don't have to assume that. The US government has already made that policy quite clear.