TO OUR management team: When I left the White House yesterday, after another two-hour round-table with the president, I knew in my gut that it was time to put in place “plan C” for this great company. The boxer, Mike Tyson, had a point when he said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” But so did Winston Churchill when he observed that “plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” We owe it to our investors, customers and 131,000 employees globally, to have a reset.

A year ago we were pursuing plan A. We expected that Hillary Clinton would win the election and that American business would continue as it has since the subprime crisis, meaning slow growth and lots of red tape but open borders and record profits that we could return to shareholders as dividends and buy-backs. Together, our firm and fellow members of the S&P 500 index have been paying out $1trn a year, far more than we invest.

After November 8th, we switched to plan B. For a few months it seemed a Republican-run Congress and White House might deliver sweeping deregulation and tax reforms to set the economy free, just as in the Reagan era. We dusted off plans to raise investment by a fifth and boost hiring at home. Like most firms we loaded the gun but didn’t pull the trigger. That was a hell of a great call.

It is now clear that dysfunction at the White House and in Congress means plan B is off the table. The markets agree. Sure, equity prices are still up. But after the election, bond yields soared in anticipation of an economic boom, only to give up half of their gains. The “Trump Bump” has faded. Yet life won’t return to normal. Our firm faces many risks. We have to fight back.

That calls for plan C, which has three elements: winning, tackling and the future. I like to use the acronym “WTF”. For a start we have to win profits from our proximity to power. I sit on the president’s CEO advisory board and he has me on speed dial to talk about trade deals and his regulatory appointments. We toasted with Diet Coke on Air Force One after we visited Saudi Arabia in May. Our firm secured a contract worth $6bn for a desalination plant in Jeddah and a licence to operate a bank in the kingdom. These two wins will lift our profits by 14% a year by 2020.

A bonfire of obsolete laws by Congress is unlikely. But as one of my friends in the White House texted me yesterday, “people are policy”. We can still win in other ways. Business-friendly folk are newly in charge of the regulatory bodies for telecoms, the environment and the stockmarket. Candidate Trump grumbled about monopolies such as AT&T and Amazon, but now he is in office he has lost interest. I like it when that happens.

But plan C also requires us to recognise new dangers coming at us hard and fast. They need to be tackled—stopped and brought down. One of the Wall Street bankers I know likes to say that the president has three personalities: chairman, showman and con man. It is the last two we need to worry about.

Our PR team is ready to tackle any 4am presidential Twitter tirade about betraying American workers. We will avoid responding directly on Twitter, but will rebut him on Facebook and in e-mails to staff and the media. Our executives must have patriotic sound-bites on the tips of their tongues: for example, 52% of our staff are in America and we invest $5bn each year here. Repeat it.

We must also confront the risk of getting entangled in the investigations surrounding the White House. Today I am imposing a ban on any commercial interaction between our firm and the president’s business or the entrepreneurial folks in his entourage. This includes lending cash to the Trump Organisation, which has at least five loans and bonds maturing in the next four years.

We must be ready to tackle any consequences of a trade war breaking out with China or Germany, or a collapse of NAFTA, with contingency plans for our global supply chains. We have secured facilities in Pennsylvania (a swing state for the president so he would like this), where some Mexican production can be moved. Any spare capacity would go to growing Asian economies. The one-off cost would be $500m—high but manageable.

Having POTUS-proofed our company, that leaves the last letter of the WTF acronym: the future of our business in America. Corporate taxes may fall, but not by much. The president is targeting a rate of 15% but most of us on the CEO advisory council think 28% is as low as it will go, based on the fiscal outlook and the president’s weakness in Congress. Since our firm, like the aggregate of the S&P 500, pays a cash tax rate of 23%, this won’t make a difference.

We expect the taxation of foreign profits to be simplified under the administration, so we can repatriate the $51bn we parked abroad without paying a large levy (by the way we are not alone—the total for S&P 500 firms is over $1trn). But with a slow economy, politics unpredictable and digital predators such as Amazon breathing down our necks in some product areas, I have zero appetite to spend it on new American factories. We’ll use it for more buy-backs, new software or foreign expansion.

West-winging it

I’ll be frank. Plan C envisions three and a half years of America going nowhere. The odds of recession are one in three. If the economy stalls, it will be hard for President Trump to be re-elected. Which brings me to my final point. America has broken a taboo by electing a business figure to the White House. By 2020, perhaps voters will be hungry for a “competence candidate”. Someone who really has run a big empire. Someone like me.

Mark Zuckerberg and Howard Schultz from Starbucks are already touring the country, running exploratory campaigns. Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase tells me he won’t run, but I don’t believe him. None of them can match my leadership record. By 2020 one of you deserves a chance to run this great company and I will seek the chance to serve America, the greatest turnaround opportunity on Earth. Keep it to yourselves for now—but the C in our new plan stands for candidate.