Why isn’t corporate America standing up to Trump?

We just did an episode on that. He's also being kind of a bully about everything. Last week he even sued JPMorgan Chase and its powerful chief executive, Jamie Dimon.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm your non billionaire host Waylon Wong and my co host today is NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspen, also not a billionaire. Maria, you have spent the last year covering how corporate America has responded to to President Trump's extremely, let's say, disruptive second term.

This has been a pretty eventful month for corporate America, even by the standards of Trump's second term. It started with the US attack on Venezuela and Trump pressuring US oil companies to invest there and then sniping at ExxonMobil after its CEO called the country uninvestable.

Trump was also more than 90 minutes late to his own party, according to the Wall Street Journal.

I read that. High tables only.

This is like a Jane Austen novel where there's very intense drama about who snubs whom at a party.

He reminds me more of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

But dance cards aside, this was all happening at a time when the public relationship between Trump and Dimon seems to be getting more tense.

very mild standards of corporate America. Take this reaction to Trump's tariffs last year.

Dimon has continued saying that the Federal Reserve should stay independent at a time when Trump is trying to take control of the central bank.

A day Later, Trump hit JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon personally with a lawsuit seeking $5 billion in damages.

But Trump has been complaining about this for years. He only filed the lawsuit after Jamie Dimon called one of his newer proposals an economic disaster, and he sued dimon personally.

Oh, all of a sudden, no one has anything to say. Now JPMorgan Chase is the biggest bank in the country, and Dimon's been running it for two decades. They should be just fine.

In October, her group and the Harris Poll surveyed business leaders across the political spectrum. They found that 84% are worried about how the current political and legal climate will affect their businesses.

That said, from a business perspective, the past year has had some payoffs for corporate America. Profits are up, the stock market is up, and Trump's tax and spending law will largely benefit businesses.

In the sectors where Trump is paying a lot of attention, some CEOs are going out of their way to court him. Take the big tech companies that are giving him fancy golden gifts and donating to his ballroom, or showing up to a private White House screening of first lady Melania Trump's new documentary as Indicator

In the most extreme cases of crony capitalism, it doesn't go anywhere good for the broader economy or for individual business leaders who ultimately fall out of favor.

Some of what's going on with business leaders is about more than Trump. Even before he was reelected, companies wanted to be talking less about politics in public.

now, big companies have mostly tried to avoid weighing in on the federal government's violent immigration crackdown. But then federal officers shot and killed Alex Preddy in Minneapolis this weekend. Now, Minnesota CEOs have put out a very carefully worded letter calling for, quote, an immediate de escalation of tensions.

This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Cyr Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie. Kate Concannon is our show's editor. And the indicator is a production of npr.