In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,
is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.
The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced outside his campaign.
At the same time, nowhere is corporate acquiescence to Trump more evident than among Republican megadonors who swore after Jan. 6, 2021, that they would never again support Trump, but who are now swallowing their pride, trickling back in obeisance to the leader who betrayed them with his encouragement of the insurrection.
In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund-raiser, told Politico:
I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate. He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term.
As if that were not enough, Levine continued, Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”
Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent out a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he has had a change of heart:
The adage of “never say never” is a wise one. I repeatedly said, since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that I will never vote for Donald Trump. Today, however, due to a dramatic change in circumstances, albeit reluctantly and with reservations, I have decided I will vote for Trump in November.
Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporters for The Washington Post, published “Many G.O.P. Billionaires Balked at Jan. 6. They’re Coming Back to Trump.”
