At a Ford plant in Michigan this week, Donald Trump clashed with an employee heckling him from the factory floor. “Fuck you,” the president mouthed at the man before raising his middle finger.

The disruption stirred by the US president’s visit is nothing new for Ford. The carmaker last month took a $19.5bn writedown as it scrapped production of its flagship F-150 all-electric pick-up truck after Trump’s crackdown on the green initiatives championed by his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has upended entire industries without warning, as he takes the most interventionist approach to business of any president in recent history, executives say.

Trump’s announcement just after 2026 began that the US would take control of Venezuela’s oil industry sent shares in American refiners soaring on the prospect of a flood of fresh crude. But it also stung executives in the US shale patch, who were already worrying about low crude prices.

Even comments on social media can shake corporate behemoths: a Truth Social threat last week to ban large investors from buying single-family homes sent homebuilder shares tumbling, while a proposed cap on credit card rates knocked Visa, American Express and shares in some big banks.

Trump’s reach also extended to the $11tn mortgage bond market: he nudged borrowing costs lower earlier this month with a post announcing plans for a $200bn asset purchase programme.

“Maga has gone Maoist. It is state capitalism. It is not remotely conservative,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor and author of Trump’s Ten Commandments, a book on how executives can manage the president’s diktats.

Conscious of the risks in provoking the president’s wrath, only a few executives at America’s biggest corporations have dared defy him.

ExxonMobil boss Darren Woods last week shrugged off Trump’s calls for drillers to pump billions of dollars into Venezuela, calling the country “uninvestable” at a White House meeting featuring the president, other senior officials and more than a dozen oil executives.

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon similarly hit Trump with a barb this week, when he said attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell could raise interest rates and inflation.

Both Dimon and Woods faced swift rebukes from a president who has shown a strong willingness to express his views about corporate America.

Industry leaders say the events of recent weeks are a taste of what is to come, with Trump’s increasingly imperious approach likely to intensify in 2026 — with enormous consequences for US business.

“This year is going to be a very turbulent one until the [November] midterms,” said the chief executive of a Wall Street bank. “We are going to have the most activist year of his presidency and we are all ready for it.”

Executives say the list of flashpoints is likely to widen. After Venezuela, advisers point to Greenland, long coveted by Trump for its strategic location and mineral resources, as a possible next target, a prospect that has already drawn the attention of energy and mining companies.

For corporate bosses, much often comes down to their ability to build personal relationships with Trump or woo him with splashy commitments.

“Trump is a president like no other,” said a lobbyist with decades of experience advising chief executives dealing with US administrations. “Some see a fascist or an autocrat, others a benevolent dictator or even a genius. Whatever the view, a blunt lesson has taken hold in boardrooms: standing up to Trump is usually a losing strategy.”

Privately, several executives concede they have little appetite for kowtowing to Trump. But advisers say a pragmatic playbook has emerged: show up, make a promise grand enough to flatter the president, and then do as little as possible until his attention shifts elsewhere.

A senior banker, who said Trump officials disliked him for his political views, admitted many CEOs preferred to stay silent because, despite the administration’s disruptive approach, the economy remained strong and stock prices broadly rallied across sectors to record levels after an initial sell-off triggered by the president’s trade war, which was later scaled back.

The president’s “One, Big Beautiful Bill Act”, which was passed late last year, has also delivered a tax windfall for many companies.

A template for courting Trump emerged at a White House dinner in September where tech chiefs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, vied to pledge tens of billions of dollars in US investment.

Zuckerberg went furthest, telling Trump he would spend “something like, at least $600bn” through 2028, drawing praise from the president — before later being caught on a hot mic apologising that he “wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with”.

The episode, executives and advisers said, underscored a lesson many had since internalised: under Trump, optics matter more than precision, and public deference often counts for more than binding commitments.

That approach, however, has not always worked.

Korean auto giant Hyundai’s chair, Chung Eui-sun, was appearing with Trump in the White House in March last year to announce an increase in the group’s total investment in the US to $21bn between 2025 and 2028.

The gesture was praised by Trump but it failed to protect Hyundai or South Korea from steep auto tariffs of 25 per cent imposed by the president two days later, while a battery plant being built by Hyundai and LG in the state of Georgia was raided by US immigration officials in September.

A top adviser to CEOs of America’s largest corporations said that despite the risk of a backlash, some of his clients felt it was their duty to country as well as shareholders and employees to use their company’s clout to push back on some of Trump’s policies that they believed risked harming national interests.

“The key is how you do it,” said the PR specialist. “You have to find a smart way to act as a corporate leader, defending your company’s and industry’s interest without alienating the president.”