The Scoop

A Wall Street investment bank with deep Democratic roots is hiring Reince Priebus, a Republican operative who served as Donald Trump’s first White House chief of staff, a sign of corporate America’s conservative shift.

Priebus will join Centerview Partners as a senior adviser, people familiar with the move said. He’ll advise companies trying to curry favor with — or simply make sense of — Trump’s Washington, where tariffs and politically tinged investigations have markets on edge and mergers on ice.

His hiring is notable at Centerview, whose co-founder Blair Effron is a big player in Democratic politics and was among Kamala Harris’ biggest backers last year. (Effron plays the public-facing role to co-founder Robert Pruzan’s inside operator). Robert Rubin, Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, has worked at the firm since 2010. Even its resident Republican heavyweight, Richard Haass, has criticized Trump’s tariffs and foreign policy.

Two months into the Trump administration, corporate America is tacking hard to the right. Dozens of companies have abandoned diversity targets. Some have made dramatic policy changes, like Jeff Bezos’ overhaul of the Washington Post. Others have offered superficial concessions, like Chevron adopting Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America” language or Disney removing content warnings from older movies with racial stereotypes. Steak ’N Shake has embraced RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again push with beef tallow fries and red baseball caps.

Know More

Priebus’ MAGA credentials are a bit scuffed — he spent just six months as Trump’s first chief of staff in 2017 — but he was a finance chair of Trump’s second-term inauguration committee, which attracted donations from blue-chip companies and CEOs. He previously ran the Republican National Committee, repairing ties with donors and building out the party’s ground game.

He is also among a “trusted group of Patriots” serving on the president’s intelligence advisory board, and his praise for Trump’s speech to Congress last week was warm enough to land in a White House round-up . Since leaving the administration in 2017, he has been chairman of the board of advisers at a lobbying firm.

Liz’s view

“Meta is early and theatrical in its rightward turn as Republicans take over Washington, but it won’t be alone,” I wrote in January , after the company replaced its top policy executive, Nick Clegg, with a Republican and pulled back from policing user posts. The political winds have shifted, and the business case for a MAGA shift is at least as strong as it was for the leftward lurch that preceded it, which fuzzily made the profit case for diversity but in reality was mostly bending to political pressure from progressives.

Centerview’s business is advising CEOs, and CEOs want to know how to work with Trump — or at least stay out of his line of fire. Positioning a merger as pro-America or securing carve-outs from tariffs could be worth billions of dollars. Priebus can likely make that case.

Room for Disagreement

This assumes that CEOs will continue to seek favor rather than stage a corporate resistance rear-guard action. Writing in The New York Times, Yale’s Jeff Sonnenfeld has a different idea : “This is the time for urgent, constructive conversation, minus the presumption of imperial fealty.”

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