On the one hand, Trump is giving the business community virtually everything it wants on many of its key policy priorities. His tax bill slashed corporate taxes. Federal agencies are systematically rolling back financial, consumer-protection, and environmental regulations. While Trump is pursuing some policies that many businesses oppose—particularly the moves to restrict immigration and raise trade barriers that are central to his insular nationalism—generally he has aligned with corporate preferences as unreservedly as any president since at least Ronald Reagan (if not Calvin Coolidge).

For business, though, the price for those wins is accepting a president committed to publicly stoning companies and individual corporate leaders who cross him. Trump’s message seems to be that businesses that play ball will be rewarded and those that don’t will be punished. That’s a political logic familiar in strong-man governments that run the spectrum from old urban machines like Richard Daley’s Chicago on one end to autocracies like Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the other.

Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, told me that other presidents who criticized business’s power, like Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, generally didn’t target individual companies. When Trump assailed Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, taking “the stock price down by publicly singling out a company and its leader… relentlessly, and without a specific public-policy purpose, there is no precedent for that,” she said.

As Koehn noted, the closest comparison is probably the spring 1962 confrontation between John F. Kennedy and Roger Blough, the chairman of U.S. Steel. Blough infuriated Kennedy by announcing he would raise steel prices more than was recommended by Washington’s informal wage-and-price guidelines at the time. That announcement came immediately after the administration had pressured the United Steelworkers union to accept a leaner-than-usual contract.

Kennedy responded with a fierce public counterattack—which included a Justice Department investigation into alleged price fixing and threats to shift Defense Department steel procurement to companies that hadn’t raised prices. Within days Blough capitulated, reversing the increase.

Kennedy’s hardball tactics would draw criticism now, and justifiably so. But what’s most relevant today is how much criticism Kennedy provoked at the time from the same conservative voices now muted on Trump’s strong-arming. After Kennedy tried to mend fences with a conciliatory speech at the U.S. Chamber, the group’s president pointedly declared, “We should remember that dictators in other lands usually come to power under accepted constitutional procedures.”

That’s a long way from the Chamber’s current messaging. Even after Tuesday’s statement, an article on the group’s homepage, bylined by longtime president Thomas Donohue, declares: “As Election Looms, Business Optimism Soars.”