Trump is tightening the screws on corporate America — and CEOs are staying mum

toggle caption Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Corporate America doesn't want to fight with President Trump in public. But as a result, it's ceding him an unprecedented amount of control over the shape — and future — of U.S. business.

In the past week, the president has turned up the heat on big companies and their CEOs to an extent that is unprecedented even by Trump's norms-shattering standards. He has publicly attacked companies and their executives throughout his political career — but now he's demanding firings of executives who aren't even household names, such as a corporate economist at Goldman Sachs.

Sponsor Message

On Monday, Trump announced an extraordinary deal for the U.S. government to take a 15% share of Nvidia's H20 chip sales in China as a condition for easing restrictions to allow the chip to be sold there. Then his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, on Wednesday said the administration may ask other companies for similar payments in the future.

"Trump has always used the bully pulpit of the presidency to try and direct business activity towards his desired ends — but in the second term, we've seen this taken to a whole new level," said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The Nvidia revenue-sharing arra