Where the hell are America’s leaders?

While Trump and his henchmen are stripping Americans of our constitutional rights, the nation’s supposed leadership class is deathly silent, or worse — helping Trump.

University presidents are silent or caving to Trump’s demands. Republican leaders are rubber stamping his authoritarianism. Too many Democratic leaders are barely putting up a fight.

The worst offenders are the leaders of some of America’s most powerful and influential corporations. 

They stood up with the rest of America against Trump when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. But now they’re silent about what Trump is doing to our democracy. Worse yet, they’re enabling him in order to protect and pad their bottom lines.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently said that he “fully supports” Trump and would welcome National Guard troops in San Francisco — a surprising turn for the billionaire who once backed a ballot initiative that would raise corporate taxes to fund homeless services. He later walked back his comments on the National Guard, but continues to back Trump.

Why the sudden support for Trump? Follow the money: Salesforce’s biggest customer is the federal government. Trump has shown how eager he is to use federal contracts to reward his friends — and Benioff doesn’t want to piss him off.

Benioff is also seeking even more massive federal contracts to help ICE hire thousands of agents at a time when ICE is disappearing people off the streets and violating due process.

Or look at Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who recently gave Trump a plaque with a 24-karat golden base and then showered him with praise at a convening of Big Tech billionaires at the White House.

Apple followed up by removing an ICE tracking app from its app store at the request of Trump’s Department of Justice — a far cry from Cook’s stance during the first Trump administration.

Now why would Tim suck up to Trump?

Because Trump has given Apple special exemptions from his tariffs. And of course, both Cook and Apple benefit substantially from Trump’s latest round of tax cuts.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, who banned Trump from Facebook after January 6th.

But that was then. 

Now, Zuckerberg has ended Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking policies, parroting Trump’s claims that the practice censored conservative views. And Meta shelled out $25 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit claiming the company censored him when it removed his accounts. Facebook has even removed an ICE tracking page at the request of Trump’s Department of Justice.

What happened to you, Mark?

Well, Meta is investing billions in AI and the power-hungry data centers that fuel it, and needs a friendly White House to ramp up development.

You see the pattern.

Benioff, Cook, Zuckerberg, and all the other billionaires selling out to Trump are happy to back his anti-democracy agenda as long as their businesses keep raking it in. They get tax cuts, federal contracts, and deregulation, and Trump gets to trample on our fundamental rights with no pushback from America’s so-called business “leaders.”

They’re showing us a reality we should have known years ago, but many of us didn’t want to see: America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides.

If they were true leaders, they’d care about America. But they don’t. They go along with Trump’s authoritarian agenda so they can enlarge their wealth and power.

So how do we fix this?

For starters, Democrats have to call out this ugly alliance. Far too many Democratic politicians gladly take money from billionaires and big corporations to keep winning elections. But what’s the point of winning if they’re in the pockets of the powerful? Democrats must swear off big money and fight for the people who don’t have power. 

But you don’t have to wait around for the Democratic Party to grow a spine. You can be that spine. 

You can run for office. Even if you don’t hold a formal office, you can organize your community, or your workplace, or your campus. 

Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and countless others who have moved the world held no formal positions of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others to fight back.

In the absence of America’s supposed traditional leaders, it’s up to the rest of us to step up.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.