What Do Chief Finance Officers Think About President Trump?

With President Donald Trump’s first year of his second term in office drawing to a close, C-suite executives and the general public aren’t worlds apart on how he has handled the job, according to the Q4 CNBC CFO Council Survey.

Approval ratings of the President are slipping, according to a national NBC News poll in November which found that around two-third of voters say he has not lived up to their expectations on the economy and cost of living.

According to the CFO survey, Chief Financial Officers are still the majority upbeat on the US economy. Over half of respondents (59%) said they don’t expect a US recession in 2026 and 73% describe themselves as optimistic on the economic outlook.

Instead, 41% of CFOs in the survey cited consumer demand as the biggest risk to their business. This reflects concern about Americans sustaining their levels of spending, with credit card balances rising by US$24bn in the third quarter of 2025 to US$1.23tn, beating an all-time high according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

A quarterly insights report from TransUnion also found that the average credit card balance per consumer now stands at US$6,523, up 2.2% year-over-year.

Finance leaders’ views on the President

Finance chiefs’ assessment of Trump in his first year are telling. The survey, which includes the views of a sample of 22 CFOs and conducted between 1 December and 8 December, found that 72% of respondents rated his performance as fair, with 10 votes, or poor, getting six votes.

Only two of them described it as excellent and four as good, despite their positive stances on the economy and market. 

Recent public polling in the US on Trump’s immigration policy is mixed, but 14 of the 22 CFOs described it as poor, saying it specifically related to the conditions needed for their businesses to succeed. Twenty of the respondents said the same about his trade policy.

The other ratings of his immigration policy are as follows:

• Excellent - 2 votes
• Good - 5 votes 
• Poor - 9 votes

There was a more positive review for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, with 62% describing his performance as good or excellent, and only one viewing the way he handles his job as poor.

Artificial intelligence driving the US economy

The Q4 2025 survey also asked about one of the driving forces of the economy, AI. Over two-thirds (68%) say their company is investing in AI but just over a quarter (27%) said they believe their company is underinvesting.

Trump said on 8 December that he will be delivering an executive order this week aimed at promoting a national “one-rule” approach to regulating AI technologies, aiming to prevent individual states from creating their own regulations for the systems.

The move may represent an effort to address concerns from tech companies that have opposed what they view as a confusing mix of state-level regulations.

“We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race,” the President wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, “but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS.”

He added: “You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!”

In an interview with CNBC, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the order “is something that’s going to really help the AI companies understand what the rules of the game are”.