In February 2018, the chief executive of one of America’s best known multinationals questioned why so many business people were down on Donald Trump.
The US president had already lied repeatedly, praised white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville and viciously attacked people and companies on Twitter. But this CEO was focused on something else: Mr Trump had just delivered a huge corporate tax cut and was rolling back regulation. “There is a lot of noise, but it’s been great,” he told a group of Financial Times journalists.
That off-the-record gathering has been on my mind as US businesses have scrambled to distance themselves from Mr Trump and his Republican supporters whose claims of a stolen election stoked last week’s violent attack on the Capitol. Now that windows have been broken, offices looted and people have died, big US corporations can’t move fast enough to decry what happened and claim they had no idea such a disaster was in the offing.