Call it a “road to Davos” moment: Jamie Dimon has seen the light.
The J.P. Morgan Chase CEO had liberals clutching at their pearls when he copped to a simple but (in some circles) unutterable truth: Former President Donald Trump — or the GOP in general — was right about a lot.
“Just take a step back and be honest,” urged Dimon in a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum confab: “He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.”
Further pushing bleeding hearts into a-fib, Dimon warned liberals off their smuggest pastime: demonizing Trump supporters.
“The Democrats have done a good job with the deplorables, hugging their Bibles and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit? And I do think the economy will affect — I think this negative talk about MAGA is going to hurt Biden’s election campaign.”
Bingo.
Seventy-four million people voted for Trump in 2020, and the polls sure suggest that the border crisis, the economy, and Biden’s feeble leadership are pushing many more to view Trump as a better choice.
Democrats continue to ignore these issues and to treat Trump supporters with contempt, at their peril.
Dimon hasn’t always been so clear-eyed; last May he grumbled that the debt ceiling was “one more thing [Trump] doesn’t know very much about.”
And Jamie has toed the line on many lefty talking points in other ways: In 2020, he infamously took a knee in a Mt. Kisco Chase branch after offering words of support for the Black Lives Matter protests; J.P. Morgan Chase then committed $30 billion to “advance racial equity.”
But Dimon seems to have gotten wise faster than many of his peers (even if much of corporate America is quietly winding down its overinvestment in diversity-equity-and-inclusion extremism).
He’s saying something his fellow Democratic elites need to hear: Voters had and still have real reasons for choosing Trump; dismissing them as nothing but backwater bigots is itself hateful and ignorant — and a quick road to defeat.