Pulpit Bully

Big business loves Trump’s plans for tax cuts and deregulation, but it’s nervous about trade—and those tweets

- Matthew Cooper

In Washington, D.C., everyone is trying to figure out whether Donald Trump will really change the way things work around here. Consider the American Action Forum, a highly respected Republican-leaning think tank. Its head, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, once led the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, was a top economic adviser to John McCain during the senator’s 2008 presidential bid and was a distinguished commissioner of the congressionally chartered panel that investigated the origins of the financial crisis (where I was a staff member). The AAF is a font of mainstream Republican thinking—advocating lower taxes and less regulation, and offering policy papers that cut against Trump’s campaign rhetoric on immigration, free trade and reforming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

I called Holtz-Eakin in early December to ask him about Trump’s recent remarks about Carrier, the air-conditioning giant and a division of United Technologies. On the campaign trail, Trump chided Carrier for its plans to move jobs from Indiana to Mexico. (Don’t mistake this for Trump’s threats against a Mexican-American judge from Indiana. That’s another kettle of tweets.) Then, early in December, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is still the governor of Indiana, announced they had persuaded Carrier, mostly through state tax incentives, to keep some of those jobs here.