So Larry, uh it's early going, but it
looks at this point like it's entirely possible, we'll
have a choice between President Biden. On the one
hand, former President Trump on the other. Give
us your sense from what we've seen so far about
these two people and what they would embrace his economic
policies. What difference it could mean for our economy
, David, I think this is probably the most
consequential presidential election uh since the Second World War,
I think you have a broad sense of what President
Biden would support because you've observed what he has uh
done. His has been a keynesian approach to economic
management. He has felt that one needs to put
very substantial emphasis on market failures, particularly in areas
relating to the environment and uh climate change. And
in the long democratic uh tradition, he has worked
to do things to support uh those who have been
left behind. He has focused on supporting what he
regards as particularly salient uh job creating industries. I
think there have been excesses on industrial policy, excesses
on uh protectionism. There has been what I thought
was uh costly misjudgment in the extent of the initial
fiscal stimulus but broadly, uh President Biden has supported
what I think is a sound activist approach uh to
uh economic uh policy. President Trump showed us what
he was made of during his four years in office
and even more clearly has showed us what his intentions
are without the superstructure of restraint that surrounded him during
his first term. He has indicated support for removal
of all kinds of legal restraints on uh the power
of the presidency. He has spoken of being dictator
. Uh for uh a day, he has spoken
of severing traditional alliances with the rest of uh the
world of undercutting long standing American approaches to international trade
to economic regulation too much. Uh Else, I
think all of this is very threatening to uh the
American economy in the same way that populism while it
sometimes yields temporary and initial economic benefits, it did
for Mussolini, it did for Peron in Argentina ultimately
brings a great deal crashing down uh around it.
And so I am very worried that we will be
a very different country that cannot rely on the rule
of law and take it for granted as we traditionally
have. Uh if we experience a second uh Trump
administration, Larry, if we cast our minds back
to November of 2016, there were a lot of
concerns about President Trump when it became clear that he
had been elected. And in fact, you remember
the markets really went South very dramatically initially, but
then they rebounded. Uh And if you look basically
on the track record of the Trump presidency just from
the point of view of investors as well as the
economy. It is not a terrible record. I
think it's fair to say. I mean, the
markets did reasonably well. There was employment created,
there was a GDP growth. So is it possible
that we might overreact the possibility of a Trump two
point? Oh, you know, there's an old
saying, fool me once, shame on you,
fool me twice, shame on me. That's gonna
be the way the rest of the world is going
to see it, the rest of the world which
has had so much faith in the United States for
all their resentments and so many have been so reliant
for so long, were prepared to see a first
term term as an aberration. But after 91 indictments
after the events of uh January 6th, that is
not how they will see a second term. That
is not how they will ever see America again.
That will represent a loss of the moral authority that
the United States has had since it won the Cold
War, since it won uh the Second World War
. And that will I think make for a much
less stable uh world. And so my plea to
my friends in the business community is I understand some
of your concerns about overly progressive, overly government interventionist
uh policies of the Biden administration. In many cases
, I share uh some of those concerns, but
that is a very different thing than undercutting the entire
framework within which the United States and its business community
have operated for all of all of our lifetimes.
And that's a risk that I think we have an
enormous stake in resisting. And I think history will
judge very badly. Those who for the sake of
a more expedient as they see it, corporate tax
position or a relaxation of what they see is overly
burdensome regulation, go along with the subversion of American
democracy. And that is what is at stake uh
in this election. I would not be speaking in
anything at all like this way if we were talking
about an election involving Nikki Haley and in fact,
an election involving Chris Christie. But I think the
involvement of ex President Trump takes all of this to
an entirely different uh level of concern.