Is corporate America welcoming a Trump dictatorship? History says yes.

If there is such a thing as a global world order on this crazy mixed-up planet, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is its every January Super Bowl. And in 2024, the captains of industry who arrive by private jet to hear how some vague future will finally solve climate change, and our many other problems, for once had something in the present to celebrate under the spectacular shadow of the Swiss Alps.

Some 3,999 miles back home, the S&P 500 stock index skyrocketed to an all-time high, as Wall Street enthused over a new survey showing U.S. consumer sentiment took its biggest two-month jump in three decades. Those numbers are an inevitable result of months of falling gas prices, cooling inflation at the supermarket, the lowest unemployment numbers in over a half-century, and the aftermath of a free-spending Christmas season.

So it was no surprise when the global groupthink was interrupted by a gaggle of American CEOs who rushed the stage in Switzerland to announce a mass endorsement of President Joe Biden, whose time in the White House has meant record profits for their companies, and ...

Ha ha ha. Was anybody fooled by this? Of course, no such thing happened in Davos — even though the U.S. presidential election that kicked off last Monday with Donald Trump’s landslide win in the GOP Iowa caucus was on the brain of every self-proclaimed, self-important “thought leader.” The forum’s chroniclers wrote that the off-the-record whispers were predictions that a Trump victory is likely in November. Then, one of Wall Street’s grand pooh-bahs said the quiet part out loud.

Jamie Dimon, heir to Wall Street’s most iconic names as longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, went on CNBC from Davos last week to warn Democrats — the party he says he “barely” belongs to even as he gives money to GOP also-ran Nikki Haley — they are making a mistake in denigrating the MAGA voters propelling the 45th president toward another Republican nomination. That’s not a new criticism, even from Democrats, but Dimon didn’t stop there.

“I don’t think they are voting for Trump because of his family values,” Dimon said. “Just take a step back and be honest: He was kind of right about NATO. He was kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.” He also gave Trump some partial credit for his China policies.

You know who else had some good ideas?

OK, before we get into the history of authoritarian strongmen and their business buddies, let’s talk about the absurd views of arguably the most powerful man in American finance. It’s not just that the specifics he cited to CNBC don’t jibe with the real world, where Trump’s tax policies increased deficits and mainly benefited Dimon’s tax bracket, and his dismal vision for NATO probably would have sacrificed Ukraine and God knows how much else of Eastern Europe to Vladimir Putin’s tanks.

But as an American brand of fascism marches forward, it was less what Dimon said than what he didn’t say. Addressing the investor class on its favorite channel, the JPMorgan Chase boss offered his critique of a fictional, bizzaro-world Trump who didn’t echo Adolf Hitler in calling his political opponents “vermin” or claim that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America,” who never promised to be a dictator for a day, and who isn’t facing 91 felony charges for — among other things — staging a failed coup aimed at thwarting the peaceful transfer of power to Biden.

Dimon’s selective memory seems to begin and end with Trump cutting taxes for him, his corporation, and his golfing buddies. The streets of Davos were overflowing with futurists pondering a middle 21st century guided by artificial intelligence, but none of these public intellectuals wanted to spoil the party by bringing up the questionable human intelligence that is inexorably driving the Republican Party, and maybe the whole American Experiment, toward autocracy.

Another CNBC article from Davos suggested that corporate CEOs are utterly unfazed by a Trump 47 presidency, even with the growing talk of dictatorship. It reported that a “U.S. bank CEO privately expressed annoyance with media exaggeration of the threat of a Trump presidency, stressing he’s ‘all bark and no bite.’ The bank chief also dismissed Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election as bloviation. ’He’s going to win the presidency,’ the CEO predicted. ‘Many of his policies were right.’”

Excuse me? Had the invention of television not yet come to this bank CEO’s hometown on Jan. 6, 2021, when five people ultimately died in the wake of Trump’s “bloviation,” and when wounded cops received the bite marks that were unquestionably worse than POTUS 45’s ”bark”? Another corporate boss insisted their slightly crazy European hosts didn’t understand that America’s systems of checks and balances mean that it — dictatorship — can’t happen here. The nation’s top capitalists seem too tunnel-focused on the next quarter’s profits to know their history, either of 2017-2021 or the 20th century.

» READ MORE: ‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did. | Will Bunch

The truth is that there’s been a symbiotic relationship between Big Business and authoritarian governments that began practically the moment Mussolini’s history-making march reached Rome in 1922. Over the last century, the world’s strongmen — from the fascists of the 1930s to the latter breed of generalissimo to today’s right-wing populist autocrats — have appealed to industrialists who believe order and stability boost the bottom line, who share a mutual enemy in left-wing labor unions, and who want to see the trains run on time and don’t want to know who’s being loaded into cattle cars.

The history of German corporations and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s is a complicated one, still debated by historians. But there’s no question that some conglomerates — most famously, the arms manufacturer Krupp and the German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben — saw Hitler’s rise as a right-wing dictator as a way to crush the communist movement and bring a certain kind of “order” to a nation discombobulated by the Weimar Republic. In 1933, with Hitler newly named as chancellor but the Nazi Party broke going into what would be his regime’s final election, the führer successfully convinced the industrialists to fork over the equivalent of $30 million in today’s dollars by pledging to end trade unions and by stating “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”

The complicated but too often comfortable relationship between German businesses and the Nazi regime eventually led to complicity in Hitler’s most horrific atrocities, such as Farben manufacturing Zyklon B, the poison used in gas chambers, to the use of Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust. It’s important to note the current authoritarian-curious mood of some U.S. CEOs is a long way yet from that kind of slippery ski slope. But it’s important for America’s everyday voters to understand that they must take the lead in saving democracy because Big Business will not.

Indeed, it’s more than a little disturbing how little has changed over the last 90 years. As the comments in Davos reveal, too many CEOs refuse to accept their winnings in terms of either profits or surging stock prices under Biden, who is the latest Democratic president to see a thriving economy after his GOP predecessor presided over sluggish job growth.

On Wall Street, Trump’s promises to lock up his political enemies, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and launch a disruptive gulag of mass deportation don’t feel problematic, but Biden’s history-making act of joining Detroit autoworkers on the picket line — a down payment on his promise to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history — was a deal-breaker. Ditto for the Democrat’s FDR-inspired social programs — some of which sneaked through a divided Congress, though many did not. In contrast, Trump is promising more tax cuts, the end of regulation, and a full embrace of fossil fuels. So what if a few eggs get broken by troops in Democratic-run cities or at a militarized border?

But then, when is corporate America on the right side of history? Also in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was starting to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, some on Wall Street hatched a “Business Plot” to depose FDR. They approached Pennsylvania’s popular “Fighting Quaker,” Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, to lead disgruntled veterans in a coup. Butler said no, but nearly a century later, they have discovered a willing Trump and his army of the aggrieved. Will democracy’s silent majority have enough troops to stop them this time?

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