- The first Trump administration was very responsive to business issues, senior German business executive Joe Kaeser told CNBC.
- “If I personally, for my company at the time, had an issue to resolve, his administration was extremely open,” said the chairman of the supervisory board of Siemens Energy.
- Despite positive experiences with the first Trump administration, it was still unclear how the second term would go, the former Siemens CEO said.
It’s still uncertain what Donald Trump’s second presidency will look like, but his first administration was very responsive to business issues with a certain modus operandi, senior German business executive Joe Kaeser told CNBC.
“If I personally, for my company at the time, had an issue to resolve, his administration was extremely open,” the chairman of Siemens Energy’s supervisory board said in an interview with CNBC’s Annette Weisbach on Thursday. Kaeser was CEO of Siemens during President-elect Trump’s first term.
Trump did “a lot of things that helped the economy” during his first four years in office, Kaeser said, noting that he believed the president-elect’s tax cuts at the time were positive.
Trump introduced a series of tax changes, including lower federal income tax brackets and larger standard deductions, as well as changes to the child tax credit, estate and gift tax exemptions, and a deduction for pass-through businesses. . A study done at the time, however, showed that Trump’s tax cuts, which were implemented in 2017, had only a limited contribution to strong US growth next year.
Taxes are again set to top the agenda for Trump as he takes office for a second term, alongside other economic policy plans such as higher import tariffs and deregulation. Analysts have said that while it is difficult to determine how many of his proposals will be implemented, some of them could have global ramifications and affect countries and businesses.
Speaking to CNBC from New York, Kaeser said Trump had “his own way of doing things” but that he “can actually predict a lot about what happens and what doesn’t happen, and so this was really a relatively easy way to understand what needs to be done for companies and countries”.
Despite positive experiences with the first Trump administration, the former Siemens CEO said it was still unclear how the second term would go.
A key difference now was that the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the White House were now “looking in the same direction,” he explained. “I believe the jury is out on what that means.”
“I think the conclusion we can take today about Germany and Europe, and for that matter every other country, is that you better be prepared, because usually people like him [Trump]who have a very distinct style of leading and reacting to, let’s say different news, is that you can only deal with those people from a position of strength. If you are weak, you better not appear in front of such an institution”, he added.
Kaeser has also been critical of Trump in the past. In 2019, Trump attacked four progressive Democratic congresswomen verbally and in social media posts, prompting a crowd at a rally to chant “bring her back” in reference to Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia as a child.
Responding to news reports of the incident, Kaeser said at the time that it was weighing on him that the most important political position in the world was becoming “the face of racism and exclusion.”
“I lived in the U.S. for many years and experienced freedom, tolerance and openness like never before. It was ‘Great America at work,'” he said in a social media post, according to a CNBC translation.