WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who wrapped up a Middle East tour in recent days. A private jet carrying Nvidia’s CEO trailed Air Force One across the region. Oil executives and bankers followed, too, as American executives dropped everything — canceling longstanding obligations and zooming into board meetings back home — to cozy up to Trump and bolster the image he tried to sell on his first major foreign trip.
With Trump back in the White House, a jaunt with the president or a stop in the Oval Office is now as routine for America’s business leaders as a speech to an industry conference.
Corporate titans are spending more time than ever working to curry favor with the administration as part of their effort to score relief from regulations — and tariffs — from the transactional president. He, in turn, is happy to use them as supporting cast members as he tries to project the economy as booming at a time when growth is slowing.
But putting in time with the U.S. president has not fully insulated companies such as Apple, Amazon, Walmart and others from Trump’s anger. It’s a sign that the public commitments they make to create U.S. jobs may be doing more to burnish the president’s image than to protect their own profitability.
In private, CEOs and executives on Trump’s trip marveled at how they came to be unofficial members of the president’s traveling party, their private jets hopscotching across the Gulf as Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. They said they had little choice but to get close to Trump, especially as he wields his tariff powers.
“I’m just thinking we have a president of the United States doing the selling,” Trump said in Abu Dhabi, standing alongside the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Tomislav Mihaljevic, and working in a dig at his presidential predecessor, Joe Biden. “You think Biden would be doing it? I don’t think so. But I think it’s so important. I have to be a cheerleader for our country.”
The host countries and the White House pulled together business conferences in a matter of weeks to give Trump a stage to show off his dealmaking on the trip. Business leaders signed partnership agreements and touted mutual investments almost as a performance for Trump and the region’s powerful ruling elites, while using the opportunity to network and share their mutual bemusement that this was now part of their job portfolio.
Trump has demonstrated that he steers business to those who ingratiate themselves to him — look no further than his promotion of Elon Musk’s Tesla — and punishes those who don’t, like Amazon during Trump’s first term and law firms, universities and a growing list of institutions in his second.
“He wants the vanity of people coming in to kiss his ring,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of Yale University’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute. He said the behavior by CEOs, while obsequious, often resulted in better treatment and free publicity from the government.
It’s not just U.S. business people paying heed. On Monday, a French executive turned up in the Oval Office with Trump.
