The phone calls flew back and forth among the nation’s top chief executives over the weekend, all asking the same questions: “What are you going to say publicly about Trump’s executive order? And what can we say about it without becoming his next punching bag?”

At the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington — a private affair that many prominent executives attended Saturday night — one person later described being buttonholed by a rival C.E.O. who asked how he could condemn President Trump’s order “without poking the bear.” Another wondered aloud whether an invitation to meet with Mr. Trump at the White House would be withdrawn if he spoke out. And yet another worried about the prospect of a boycott of their companies’ products depending on the acerbity of their words.

Welcome to the new reality for corporate America.

Last fall, John Chipman, the director-general and chief executive of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, advanced the notion that in our globalized world, “every company needs a foreign policy.” Now, our largest companies also have to think about having a domestic policy — and possibly a moral policy, too.