For most of the twentieth century, the Republican Party was the preferred party of the American capitalist class. While the Democrats were never totally bereft of support from American business, retaining the allegiance of various sectors even at their lowest moments, most business owners supported the GOP most of the time. This support, in turn, formed the foundation of Republican administrations from William McKinley to Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush. Though the House of Morgan and the House of Enron, to take two concerns linked particularly closely to the administrations that bookend this period, may both have fallen, the creative destruction of capitalist accumulation did not fundamentally disturb the alliance between business and the Republican Party.

Given the adamance of this alliance over the course of a century, its dissolution since the rise of Donald Trump is all the more striking. Trump ran for president in 2016 assuring voters, “You know the nice part about me? I don’t need anybody’s money. . . .  I will tell you this: Nobody’s putting up millions of dollars for me. I’m putting up my own money.”¹ American capitalists were only too happy to oblige him, and they largely closed their wallets to Trump or donated to Hillary Clinton. Just four years earlier, they had happily coalesced around Mitt Romney.² In 2020, capital once again shunned Trump as Joe Biden raked in massive hauls from Wall Street.³ One survey of a hundred CEOs found that seventy-seven planned to vote for Biden.⁴ Trump’s third run, in 2024, saw the same dynamic. Among CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, only one — Elon Musk — donated to Trump.⁵ There has been, in short, an epochal realignment of business away from the Republican Party, particularly at the top of the ticket.⁶

The novelty of the GOP’s alienation from the American capitalist class has served to reinforce the widespread impression that Trump has dramatically altered the trajectory of the party. This narrative, however, is deeply misleading. The estrangement between capital and the Republican Party did not begin with Trump’s rise. Rather, conflict among an increasingly politically fractured capitalist class came to dominate the party’s internal life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, radicalizing elements of the party while producing a stalemate between factions that Trump was able to exploit. By the time Trump took over, conflict between the party and key employers’ institutions like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce was a familiar element of American politics.⁷ It may have gone further under Trump than ever before, but it did not begin with him.