Imagine it’s Christmas and you’ve invited a friend to spend the holiday with your family. You’ve barely dropped your bags and there he is, Jabba the Hutt in human form: your mortifying uncle who makes your entire being cringe on a good day, but on this particular morning is already nine eggnogs deep. Before your friend has taken off her coat, he’s made eight different sexist comments, including one involving Mrs. Claus and you think Prancer, but it was hard to tell through the slurring. During dinner, bits of ham, cheesy potatoes, and peppermint bark fall out of his mouth amidst diatribes about “illegals” stealing his cable. At one point, he excuses himself to use the bathroom—or as he so charmingly puts it, to “drain the lizard”—and on the way out tells your friend, who is Jewish, “I knew a Hebrew once.“ When he returns, he repeatedly challenges your mother to an I.Q. test, and when she refuses, aggressively remarks, “You think you’re better than me, Brenda?” While everyone is having coffee and cake in the living room, he tries to hump the family dog, trips, and face-plants into a buffet of Christmas cookies, frosting and broken bits covering his face and neck as he slow-rolls across the floor. Imagine this, and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s like for American C.E.O.s to do business abroad in the era of Trump, otherwise known as their collective drunk, mortifying uncle.

Per DealBook:

What’s eating American C.E.O.s? We have some insight, thanks to the Yale C.E.O. Summit with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld last week in New York. The event was strictly off the record, but DealBook has the results of a survey of 134 business leaders who were there . . . Three in four C.E.O.s said they often apologized to their international business partners about the president’s messages.

Presumably it’s gotten to the point where—and this is just a for instance—Jamie Dimon walks into meetings with his counterparts abroad and tells them, essentially: “Before we get down to business I just want to say, yes, I know, he’s a big dumb animal.”

In the same survey, a whopping 87 percent of respondents said Trump’s “negotiating style [has] cost the nation the trust of its allies,” three-quarters said he isn‘t “leading effectively on issues critical to U.S. national security,” and 80 percent said the notion of the president using an arrested Chinese tech executive as a bargaining chip to get a better trade deal was insane (fact-check: true!). Alarmingly, nearly half of those respondents believe the U.S. could be in a recession by the end of the end of 2019*—the administration insists any “r” talk is fake news—while 67 percent said “U.S. political instability” and President Buy and Sell’s trade negotiations are the greatest threat to U.S. markets. All of this, as a reminder, is coming after Trump pitched himself as the guy who knows more about the economy, trade, taxes, debt, banking, jobs, and “money” in general than anyone else on the planet.

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