I’ve long promised myself that, during Trump II, I would not fall into the trap of obsessing over the president’s relentless efforts to be “disruptive” or to “own the libs.” We’ve seen this show before, although the encore seems decidedly more unhinged, and there are close to zero “adults in the room” this time around. If you were counting on Marco Rubio or Scott Bessent to put the brakes on, don’t bother. Ditto the U.S. business leaders who occasionally served as conscientious objectors during Trump I. Stakeholder capitalism is out. Fiduciary duty is in. A realpolitik chill has settled across the world of high finance, too. As one particularly sober Wall Street executive observed, there’s hardly 18 months until the midterm elections, whereupon the incumbent president’s party historically loses seats in the House. Among his worries for the G.O.P., he said, “I see inflation ticking up. I see interest rates still elevated. I see jitters in the equity markets.” More urgently, he continued, the promised “investment banking bonanza” is not yet materializing. “I don’t care if you have Saint Francis of Assisi in there, or Mussolini—until you get the yield on the 10-year [Treasury bond] down, you can forget about it.” Trump’s proclaimed “golden era” for America will turn to dust, he predicted, unless the yield on the 10-year Treasury stays below 5 percent—it’s at 4.5 percent these days. “It’s been a golden era for TIPS,” he joked, referring to the bonds that are a hedge against rising inflation.

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On the many other crazy things happening in and around Washington, such as Elon Musk getting his mitts on your Social Security information, the executive was more sanguine: “Do I trust Musk less than I trust the government bureaucrats who have access to it? No. The histrionics on both sides don’t interest me all that much,” he said, adding that he wants to see $1 trillion savings out of the federal budget. “We need to do it, by the way, because we have a $2 trillion deficit.” Regarding Trump’s unfulfilled promise to end the war in Ukraine on “day one” or “even before,” the executive sees what’s happening now as the start of negotiations, even if Putin and Zelensky aren’t in the same room and Trump has called the latter a dictator. “Do I think that presenting a proposal to take half [of Ukraine’s] minerals, at this stage of the game, is not very smart?” the exec said. “Yes. Is it part of a plan to pressure [Zelensky] to reach an agreement? Yes. Do you have to show Putin a path to his defeat? Yes, you have to make a credible threat to Putin that if you don’t agree to a deal, we’re going to fucking ramp up the aid, and you could lose this thing.” (Alas, the administration seems to have skipped over that last part.) He said a negotiated solution is the only way out of the war. “It’s a stalemate, despite the fact that we’re arming them to the teeth,” he said, noting that the only ones happy about that are the defense contractors minting money.

As I continued my canvassing of Wall Street, I was intrigued by some recent comments offered by Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations (of which I’m a member) and former Lazard board member who is now a senior counselor at Centerview Partners, the immensely successful advisory boutique founded by Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan. Richard is one of the few Wall Streeters willing to speak up under his own name. In a Substack post on Tuesday, Haass confided that he used to be a Democrat, then became a Republican, then decided to have no party affiliation. (“I could not rejoin the Democratic Party, as, with few exceptions, it had become a collection of special interests mostly rooted in identity politics,” he wrote.) Now, without a tribe, he finds himself struggling a bit to conceptualize a coordinated response to Trump beyond MAGA servility or liberal hysteria. “There has to be a better response than emulating the ostrich and burying your head in the sand in the hope it will blow over,” he wrote. “Nor is indiscriminate opposition the answer, as certain Trump initiatives arguably deserve support and, in any event, should be judged on their merits.” He enumerated the parts of Trump’s agenda, in his view, that are worthy of serious consideration, including “rooting out actual waste and fraud in the government, phasing out a penny that costs more to make than it’s worth, making girls’ and women’s sports safe and competitive for girls and women, rolling back questionable aspects of D.E.I., enacting return-to-office policies, and tightening immigration laws and their enforcement.” On the other hand, Haass wrote, criticism and resistance are called for when it comes to pardoning the January 6 convicts, firing inspectors general and career prosecutors, shutting down USAID (this one has been debatable among the Wall Street crowd, as I’ve noted), calling for an end to birthright citizenship (being adjudicated in the courts), withdrawing security details from former government officials, freezing funds already appropriated by Congress, and nominating for cabinet positions people better suited to a Star Wars bar scene. And that’s to say nothing of the imperialist posturing regarding Gaza, Greenland, Panama, and Canada. Haass urged Americans to come up with meaningful alternatives to Trump’s thrusts, not just criticisms. (A much harder task, it’s true.) “If you don’t like Trump’s Gaza initiative, and there is good reason not to, then spell out what you are prepared to support, and why that proposal would be a superior alternative,” he wrote. “Make the case for foreign assistance and an improved USAID. Suggest how the NIH and other recipients of federal funds could be streamlined and made more efficient, as you illustrate how Trump’s proposed cuts could devastate critical, ongoing research into cures for deadly diseases.”

The relative equanimity of Haass and my faithful Wall Street executive correspondent is not a universal trait, of course. A former C.E.O. told me he’s been “very, very unsettled” by the “three or four things” that Trump and his team of merry pranksters have concocted nearly every day, the sort of things that get lost in the media haze. He zeroed in on the DOGE crew asking for the “sensitive information” about millions of Americans housed at the Social Security Administration, which caused a top official there to resign in protest over the weekend. “What’s the data inside the Social Security Administration file?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s all of your information, right? All of your family, your salaries, your history, what your taxes have been.”

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That’s just the “tip of the spear,” he continued, mentioning Trump’s firing of 2,400 senior FBI counterterrorism officials and the inspectors general inside various agencies and departments, whose very job it is to hold government officials accountable. “It’s not even a question. Are we heading for a constitutional crisis?” he said. “We are in a constitutional crisis.” But what he’s most upset about, he said, was that “so many of the people we know” are “so blithe about it.” And this is where he really had a point. In recent weeks, I’ve chronicled a surprising normalization of Trump’s initial policies among the crowd that really runs Wall Street. (Indeed, some even shrugged off his threat to close the carried interest loophole.) This top executive continued: “If you had [a Trump-supporting Wall Street C.E.O.] on the phone, he’d say, ‘Yeah, some of this is going to be a little messy, but it had to happen. I’m not saying I love the way Elon Musk moves around, but you know, more good will happen than bad.’ That’s what you’d hear, and that’s not true.” Instead, the C.E.O. said that he sees Trump taking a page from the Viktor Orbán playbook. “Media control through intimidation,” he said. “Benefits to good friends. You’re seeing that with Zuckerberg. You’re seeing that with Amazon. I mean, how about paying Melania Trump, personally, $27 million to do a controlled documentary?” Before we hung up, he said the capitulation among Republican politicians has been especially outrageous. Appointing Pete Hegseth to run the Defense Department was like “saying to somebody who has a little, nice, successful podcast, Why don’t you go run Apollo? It’s insane.” He was especially critical of Senators Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, and Joni Ernst for voting for Hegseth’s appointment. “To allow yourself to be a supplicant to these people because somebody’s going to primary you? Are you kidding?” Perhaps Steve Cloobeck, the billionaire who sold his hospitality company to Apollo a few years back and is now running as a Democrat for governor of California, put it best. Cloobeck—who may soon be competing for the Sacramento job against Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany, as well as Kamala Harris—has met the president several times. Alas, his diagnosis was that Trump is enamored of people like Musk and “bougie wealth,” because he thinks it might trickle down to him—a restless, outerborough resentment that seems to have eclipsed any sense of personal ethics. “It’s sad,” Cloobeck told me, “because, as strong as he is, we found his kryptonite. Everything’s about money and greed. It’s not the way we roll. We have values. The one thing the Democratic Party will need to establish is a new brand based on values, articulated in three sound bites instead of word salad. That’s what I’m working on in the state as a bully pulpit. And then nationally.” Is this the sound of the start of the Democratic resistance, reconstituting itself yet again for a more conservative era, or just more wishful thinking?

Finally, a quick mea culpa to my friend Kara Swisher, who was misidentified in last Sunday’s email as Linda Yaccarino’s interlocutor during the X C.E.O.’s cringe-inducing interview at the Code conference in September 2023. Yaccarino was in fact chatting with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, not Kara. Well done, Julia.

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