As Ireland – along with the rest of the world – grapples with how best to handle the incoming US president, an interesting proposition has emerged: our most effective interlocutors with Donald Trump could be our most successful and noisy business leaders.
One of the proponents of this idea is Silicon Valley veteran John Hartnett who in a recent interview with The Irish Times made a salient point; Trump is far more likely to listen to a successful businessman than an accomplished statesman.
Hartnett singled out Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair group chief executive, as someone who Trump would listen to. Not only because of O’Leary’s international stature, but also because Ryanair is one of Boeing’s largest customers. The US aircraft maker may be struggling, but nothing says “America first” quite like Boeing planes lined up at airports around the world.
There are plenty of other Irish companies with deep roots in MAGA country.
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Glanbia is one of the biggest producers of American-style cheddar cheese in the US. Following Smurfit’s merger with US packaging group WestRock, it now has around 300 paper mills and box factories stretching from Anchorage to Tampa, employing 50,000 people. Likewise CRH has almost 2,000 locations in North America employing almost 50,000 people.
These are the blue-collar jobs that Trump claims he will protect and grow, and part of the reason Ireland is the seventh largest source of foreign investment into the US.
Hartnett has suggested that the annual St Patrick’s Day jamboree in Washington, DC, would be a good time for a sit down between Trump and the titans of Irish business. Or else some sort of contrived trip to Ireland by the president with some golf thrown in.
We have no idea what O’Leary, Hugh McGuire (Glanbia), Tony Smurfit or Jim Mintern (CRH) think of Trump and his politics, but it would anyway be quite an ask to get them all in a room together to massage his ego.
Leaving aside their politics, it is not really in the make-up of corporate leaders to supplicate. They will do what is needed in the interests of their business, but their willingness to bend the knee for auld Ireland is not a given.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos may have been happy to prostrate themselves before Trump with almost unseemly haste, but their actions are almost entirely based on self-interest. Their businesses stand to lose or gain substantial amounts of money based on the quixotic whims of the US president-elect.
Political capital
Before Micheál Martin picks up the phone to O’Leary to ask him if he has any plans for March 17th, he would be advised to stop and think whether it’s really necessary to expend so much of his and corporate Ireland’s political capital.
It is a bit early to say, but all the indications are that the play book for Trump’s second term will be very similar to the first. Only this time Greenland, Panama and trade wars will take the place of a border wall as Trump once again performs the magician’s trick of misdirection.
Writing in the Atlantic recently, Jonathan Chait made the point that the core of Trump’s policy agenda will be regulatory and tax changes that will, in the most part, benefit wealthy Americans as well as big donors to his campaign and the Republican Party.
There is not much in it for the MAGA base. They will need to be entertained and distracted from the potentially negative consequences for them personally of Trump’s core policy platform. Hence his floating of preposterous notions of bullying Canada into becoming a state of the union and of the US invading Greenland and Panama.
So far it’s working. As happened with Trump’s first term, the rest of the world and its leaders, wittingly or otherwise, seem prepared to play along as some kind of straight man in a comedy double act.
The US exchequer may be losing out on Ireland’s economic model, but Trump is cashing in at Doonbeg
A number of implied threats to Ireland were uttered during the US presidential election campaign. Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s trade representative during his first term, has described Ireland’s tax-driven investment model as a transfer of wealth from the US to Ireland.
Likewise, the incoming commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has singled out Ireland’s trade surplus with the United States as nonsense.
It is hard to know just how seriously to take the threats implied in these comments. Are they just bluster along the lines of renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America?
It is worth asking why would either Lighthizer or Lutnick support crashing the economy of a country in which their boss has invested in a golf club that made a profit of €2 million in 2022. The US exchequer may be losing out on Ireland’s economic model, but Trump is cashing in at Doonbeg.
Likewise, Lutnick owns an estimated 60 per cent of investment adviser Cantor Fitzgerald whose Irish subsidiary turned a €9 million profit in 2023.
It would seem a fairly safe bet that the incoming Trump presidency will mimic the first in so far as its deeds will not match its words.
There is one caveat – the absence this time of what were called the adults in the room: members of the administration with the authority and ability to rein in Trump’s excesses.
The Government here has much to ponder before asking the captains of Irish industry to pull on the green jersey and bend the knee.
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