World stock markets have tumbled in response to President Trump’s escalating tariff battles with Canada and China, but American business leaders have largely refrained from public criticism in “a departure from the public stances CEOs often took during Trump’s first term,” noticed The Wall Street Journal. Economists agree that tariffs are taxes, which decrease economic efficiency and increase the price of consumer goods, but top business leaders have almost gone out of their way to avoid criticizing Trump’s tariffs.

“The business community is always going to want lower tariffs … everywhere in the world,” acknowledged Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon, but “the business community understands what the president is trying to do with tariffs.”

“We all have sweaty palms right now. We’ve all lost a lot of money in the last couple of weeks. But, as Trump has said, we’re going to have a little short-term pain here to realign the economy in a way that benefits our country,” economist Stephen Moore said on “This Week on Capitol Hill.”

These comments seem to reflect business leaders’ decision to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, rather than what they themselves believe. Moore also said, “I am a kind of free trade guy. And I do believe free trade benefits the United States and other countries.”

In fact, business leaders are expressing far more skepticism behind closed doors. At a Yale summit of CEOs, the event organizer described “universal revulsion against the Trump economic policies” among attendees.

Yet those same CEOs declined to publicly criticize the president, according to a poll of attendees. Less than half (44%) said they would speak out if stock values dropped by 20% (the “correction” threshold), with 22% preferring to wait until stocks dropped 30%, and nearly a quarter saying they didn’t see it as their role to push back publicly. “The mood has totally changed,” said former CEO George Bill George. “What you’re hearing publicly is not what you’re going to hear privately. … They don’t want to get on the wrong side of the president and his constituents.”

Gone are the days when businesses felt empowered to virtue signal over any social or political cause, no matter how irrelevant. After Bud Light, Target, and Trump’s convincing electoral victory, they won’t even challenge him where their key economic interests are concerned.

At least, they won’t challenge Trump publicly, The Wall Street Journal suggested. Some CEOs believe “they can have more of an impact in talks behind closed doors.”

Other considerations also inform the change in tactics from American business leaders. Some hope that tariffs “would mostly serve as a short-lived bargaining chip,” reports The Journal, and they fear that public criticism will prompt Trump to double down even harder on the damaging policies.

Then again, business leaders like the rest of Trump’s economic agenda, including tax cuts, deregulation, and boosts to American industry. They don’t want to derail these aspects of Trump’s agenda by overly vocal criticism of tariffs, especially since these pro-growth policies will help offset the damage done by tariffs. “We’re going to cut taxes. We’re going to cut regulation. We’re going to produce American energy. We’re going to have better trade deals,” listed Moore.

“More specific actions on the regulatory front” would lead to a pickup in activity,” Solomon suggested. The Trump administration is “engaged with the business community,” he added, “a different experience than what we’ve had over the course of the last four years.”

Perhaps business leaders may also believe, based on past performance, that the stock market will eventually rebound from any adjustments to the Trump tariffs. “Six or nine months from now, we’re going to have a much better stock market than we do today,” Moore asserted. “You don’t want to sell now. And I’m not saying that the selloff is over. What I’m saying is, sometimes investors make [the mistake that], when they see a falling market, they try to sell their stock. And that’s not what you want to do to make money. You want to buy low and sell high.”

Business leaders may also hold out hope that Trump’s trade wars may reduce overseas tariffs on American-made goods. “Trump has made this point very persuasively, in my opinion, that these other countries are ripping us off. I mean, they are charging tariffs that are two, three, four, five times higher than our tariffs,” said Moore. “I’m sick and tired, frankly, of these sanctimonious Europeans and China saying, ‘How dare Donald Trump start a trade war?’ I mean, wait a minute. How are we starting the trade war? We have lower tariffs than these countries.”

Perhaps an unspoken reason why business leaders have lined up behind the Trump tariffs is that Trump has made it easier for them to give soft support than hard opposition. The lines almost write themselves: “We inherited a mess … from Joe Biden with massive deficits, massive debt, runaway prices, all of these things it takes time to fix. It took time for Reagan to fix the mess that Jimmy Carter left,” Moore suggested. (This argument is ironic, given Reagan’s embrace of free trade.)

“The next three or four or five months are going to be tough. And that’s just the way it is when you’ve had an incompetent president in office for four years,” Moore concluded. “It’s been a tough week, but I guarantee you we’re going to get through this. I have so much confidence, as you do, in this president. He is pro-business. He’s pro-investor. He’s pro-America. He’s sticking up for America in these trade negotiations.”

The bottom line is that President Trump appears likely to get his way on tariffs, if not even prominent business leaders can find the courage to criticize the economic impacts of his plan.

This is a result of the climate Trump himself has created. His tendency to respond favorably to praise but negatively to criticism has weeded out loyal critics from his inner circle. Over the past decade, others have noticed this pattern in Trump and have adapted their behavior accordingly, often muting their criticism to avoid attracting Trump’s ire and to keep the president’s ear.

While this posture ensures that Trump gets his way, it does not ensure that he takes the path of wisdom. The wisest king who ever lived wrote, “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27:5-6). After a decade of dominating American public life, Trump has insulated himself against friendly criticism, even from America’s top business leaders.