President Donald Trump said he’d support the U.S. taking an equity stake in companies that receive coronavirus-related aid from taxpayers and prohibiting firms from increasing executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
“We don’t want that,” Trump said Thursday at a White House news conference. “Some companies, as you know, did stock buybacks. It’s very hard to tell them not to but I would tell them not to.”
He answered “I do, I really do” when asked whether he supports the U.S. taking equity stakes in companies that receive assistance, an idea that his top economic adviser Larry Kudlow publicly suggested on Wednesday.
Asked if he would ban buybacks and bonuses as a condition of a stimulus bill under development in Congress, Trump said: “It takes many, many people -- in this case -- to tango. Conditions like that would be O.K. with me.”
Trump later hinted that some companies now asking for the government’s assistance had previously engaged in buybacks, suggesting he’d be less willing to help them. Trump has been criticized for a wave of buybacks that followed his 2017 corporate income tax cut.
“People are coming in for money, in some cases no fault of their own but in some cases where they did certain things over the course of the years including buying back stock,” Trump said. “You know, they bought back stock and they paid a high price for it, as it turned out. Maybe I view that as a little bit differently than somebody that didn’t, than somebody that built plants all over the United States -- of which there were plenty of them too.”
Some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have begun to object to plans to provide grants to companies as part of the stimulus, characterizing them as corporate bailouts. Trump said he aims to help workers, not companies.
“We don’t want to pick winners and losers,” he said. “We want everybody to benefit.”
Trump said he intends to help the airline, cruise ship and hotel industries. The president’s company, the Trump Organization, operates hotels in Washington, D.C, New York, Las Vegas and elsewhere.
“Where jobs are created, you don’t want to lose industries like this. These are incredible industries, you can’t lose them. So we’ll be focused on many industries,” he said.