Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

Q: Is political activism part of a CEO's job description now and into the future? A: "Yes, and they've rediscovered that. It's a great thing at this generation. So I was mentioning we'd lost our way in the business community for a while, but not now."

"The great French political scientist who came to study US penal reform in the early 18 hundreds, Alexis de Tocqueville, as you know, wrote the great book Democracy in America. And he looked at community leaders, many of them were business leaders, and said what was really one of the most defining differences of American society was that these people create not just the spirit of volunteerism, but something he coined the term social capital, which people think is a term from the last few years. No, de Tocqueville did it in 1830. And that social capital is as important, if not more important than financial capital. And that's what these CEOs are doing. They're fortifying social capital and they're quite good at it."

"A hard part is the more they engage on this, the more people come at them for every issue. And they do have a business to run too. So as much as they support sustainability initiatives and gun safety and voting rights and everything else out there as police reform and economic development in different communities, they also want to make sure their business is successful. So they have to pick and choose the issues that they engage in. And there are guidelines that make sense to different CEOs."

"I'm hearing great fear and revulsion. It was nice to hear David Rubenstein say that he has confidence… in the nation's national security apparatus. He would be an outlier, even though he was condemning of President Trump as well. In that clip is that there's widespread fear that the greatest threat to national security right now is our own commander in chief. And these CEOs are all worried about putting in the guardrails."

"But I really support and endorse the national association of Manufacturers' very clear statement calling for either the invocation of the 25th amendment impeachment or the president's [Trump] resignation. And today's Wall Street Journal is quite striking, too. Asking or demanding that the president resign be good or best for everybody."

"100% of the CEOs at our summit, at our informal caucus had said that they will no longer fund these seditions supporting GOP congressmen, which is half of the GOP house and 25% of the GOP senate. That's astounding. And these are people who have followed through in the past on whether or not it had to do with assault weapons in stores or having to do with immigration issues over the summer and challenging administration or the auto industry on EPA rollbacks or even the energy issues EPA rollbacks. They have in fact challenged things that you would have thought were not in their self interest because these business leaders have risen to the occasion as corporate statespersons."