In the 1930s, fashion entrepreneur Hugo Boss saw opportunity in Hitler’s rise. A German businessman and an early member of the Nazi Party, his clothing company used forced labor in German-occupied territories and prisoner-of-war camps to manufacture uniforms for the SS and the Wehrmacht.

The willingness of business interests to align themselves with dubious political leaders has a long history.

Some of America’s top business executives are carrying on the tradition today with their apparent willingness to reconnect with Donald Trump.

At a June 13 Business Roundtable meeting in Washington, D.C., about 80 CEOs met with Trump, including Apple’s Tim Cook, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and  Xerox CEO Steven Bandrowczak. 

The executives told the Wall Street Journal their willingness to listen to Trump stems from frustration with President Biden, a growing sense that Trump could win the presidency again and a desire to shape the Republican’s agenda before the election. 

This warming to Trump comes despite his legacy of inflammatory and divisive rhetoric, his role in the chaos of Jan. 6 and his relentless effort to undermine the 2020 election and overturn the legitimate results. This is also a man who  admired the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and told Xi Jinping that he had no problem with Xi putting ethnic/religious minorities into detention camps. 

Larry Diamond, an expert on democratic governance at the Hoover Institution, told CNN that Trump, clearly a damaged man, “has massive responsibility for creating the normative atmosphere in which extremism, hatred, racial bigotry and violent imagery have prospered and metastasized.”

“Looking back at it now, the most surprising thing about the Donald Trump presidency is that we survived it at all: the lies, the chaos, the ignorance, ugliness, recklessness and lawlessness,” Bill Press, a senior political contributor on CNN, wrote in The Hill. Press noted not only “how bad the Trump presidency was, but how dangerous, operating without any limits, a repeat Trump performance would be.”

Too many American business leaders seem ready to ignore that ominous warning. They are doing so at great risk to themselves and America.