On Thursday evening, Donald Trump will take the stage with nine of his fellow contenders for the Republican presidential nomination with a solid six weeks of campaigning behind him, maintaining a solid lead in the polls despite two major gaffes—making disparaging comments about Mexican people and downplaying Sen. John McCain’s status as a “war hero.”
We know what other candidates tend to think of Trump: his bluster outweighs his experience, he’d be an ineffective president, and he may end up hurting the Republican brand.
But what do Trump’s colleagues from his old stomping ground, the world of business, think of him? As you might expect with someone with a personality like Trump, there’s a lot of burned bridges, hurt feelings and, occasionally, some outright nastiness.
Take, for example, Trump’s relationship with music industry mogul Russell Simmons. The founder of Def Jam may consider Trump a friend, but he doesn’t want him to be president. In fact, according to the Huffington Post, Simmons said that he thought Kim Kardashian would make a better president than The Donald.
Trump has also recently run into conflict with John Legere, the confrontational leader of T-Mobile. In April of this year, before Trump announced his run for the presidency, Legere was staying at a Trump hotel in New York and complained about a drummer making noise outside of his room. Trump’s response? He scolded Legere on Twitter, complaining that T-Mobile had terrible service and wasn’t wanted in Trump buildings.
To be sure, not all businessmen are anti-Trump. Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently said Trump’s candidacy was the “best thing to happen to politics.” This is despite the fact that in 2013 Trump bragged on Twitter that he was better looking than Cuban, calling his now-supporter “dopey.”
Another former friend Trump has alienated? Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive and TV commentator. Deutsch criticized Trump’s involvement in the “birther” movement that called for President Obama to prove he was a natural-born citizen. Trump then claimed that Deutsch begged to be on “The Apprentice.” Deutsch chalked the disagreement up to “hair envy.”
You’ll notice that many top American executives—people like Mary Barra, Tim Cook, and Warren Buffett—aren’t mentioned above, because they haven’t really engaged with Trump in recent years. Perhaps they’re just afraid of getting in the way of the whirling dervish of chaos that is The Donald. Or perhaps they just fancy themselves above engaging with Trump, whose recent record as a businessperson leaves something to be desired.
