CEOs seemingly weren’t too pleased with former President Donald Trump’s performance during their private meeting with him in Washington this week, according to a report by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Friday.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee addressed top business leaders and spoke of his hopes to further cut the corporate tax rate in a meeting that featured Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
A number of CEOs walked into the meeting being “Trump supporter-ish” or leaning toward backing him in November before walking out and finding him to be “remarkably meandering,” according to Sorkin, who recalled speaking with business leaders who attended the meeting on Thursday.
″[He] could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map and, it was maybe not surprising, but was interesting to me ’cause these were people who I think might’ve been actually predisposed to him and actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him, actually,” said Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
One CEO told CNBC that the former president didn’t outline how he hopes to achieve his policy proposals while at least two people in the meeting described Trump’s energy as being subdued.
Sorkin, in a separate appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said CEOs walked away from the meeting feeling “a bit disheartened.”
″[They were] a bit questioning, I don’t want to say his mental fitness but questioning just how meandering. How, in some cases one said to me, he could not keep a thought straight,” Sorkin said.
“He would go in one direction and then go into another direction and that there wasn’t really necessarily a through line to the way he spoke and what even he was talking about.”
Trump also discussed his desire to bring the corporate tax rate down from its current 21% to 20% before being asked why he decided on the latter rate, according to Sorkin.
“And he said, ‘Well, it’s a round number,’ and I think that that onto itself had a number of CEOs shaking their head given that 1% of the total tax burden on the country is actually a huge number in terms of what is needed to support the revenue for this country,” Sorkin said.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump 2024 campaign, told CNBC that the former president was “warmly received by everyone in the room” and “commended for his policy proposals on deregulation and tax cuts.”