Under his 24-year leadership, the lobbying group developed enormous clout in Washington, but he broke with the Trump administration over immigration and the 2020 election.

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Thomas J. Donohue in his office in Washington in 2013. He was a scrappy can-do cheerleader for both corporate America and Main Street. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Sam Roberts

By Sam Roberts

Oct. 16, 2024

Updated 1:28 p.m. ET

Thomas J. Donohue, who transformed a moribund U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a lobbying behemoth and who in recent years challenged President Donald J. Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration, died on Monday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 86.

The cause was heart failure, his son Thomas Jr. said.

From his perch across the street from the White House, the Brooklyn-born Mr. Donohue was a scrappy can-do cheerleader for corporate America and Main Street as the chief executive of the chamber for 24 years, until he retired in 2021. (From 1997 until 2019, he was simultaneously the chamber’s president, until Suzanne P. Clark succeeded him.)

As the Republican Party shifted to the right, the chamber stood its ground in the political center. Under Mr. Donohue, it split with the Trump administration by supporting free trade and immigration reform, and pledged to “more fully reward” members of Congress who “reach the compromises necessary for effective governing.”

Even before Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, Mr. Donohue, interviewed on Bloomberg television, said, “Donald Trump has very little idea about what trade really is.” On social media he warned that “under Trump’s trade plans,” including higher tariffs on imported goods, “we would see higher prices, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy.”

Without naming names, Mr. Donohue also cautioned that refusal to grant talented immigrants visas to come to America was “morally wrong and politically stupid.”

“If you want businesses to grow and the economy to rebound, you allow skilled workers to come here legally to work and contribute to the well-being of our nation; you don’t lock them out,” Mr. Donohue wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2020.

The chamber joined other business groups in suing the Trump administration to overturn the restrictions on visas for highly-skilled immigrants.

“If you want the next revolutionary start-up to be founded in America,” he added in his essay, “you welcome foreign students; you don’t threaten to upend their lives and send them home during the middle of a pandemic.”

The Trump administration rescinded its policy of banning foreign students on the condition that they took only online classes.

The chamber also sought to distance itself from congressional Republicans who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election on the basis of false claims of fraud. The chamber said that while “we do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” in making future endorsements it would consider “future conduct that erodes our democratic institutions.”

In 2020, the chamber, with its long history of favoring business-friendly Republican policies, endorsed 23 Democrats in congressional races, more than three times the number it supported in 2018.

The chamber’s primary mission echoed Calvin Coolidge’s mantra that “the chief business of the American people is business.” Mr. Donohue defined that mission broadly and fortified his arsenal to advance it.

He oversaw the establishment of the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform to lobby for legislation that would, among other goals, make it more difficult for consumers to hold companies accountable for negligence, including workplace safety and environmental hazards.

He expanded the role of the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center to defend industry against what were deemed to be frivolous or unreasonable lawsuits (such as claims that Tootsie Rolls are unhealthy because they contain too much sugar and trans fats) and to initiate legal proceedings to challenge regulatory overreach.

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Mr. Donohue, flanked by John Engler, the president of the Business Roundtable, left, and Jay Timmons, the president and chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, at a Chamber of Commerce news conference in 2014.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The chamber also successfully lobbied for legislation to shift class-action cases to federal courts from state jurisdictions, which were considered more accommodating to plaintiffs.

Under his leadership, the chamber reclaimed its pre-eminent role from formidable but niche groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable, but also intervened on behalf of specific industries, like cigarette makers.

“If individual companies went out and sued the S.E.C. or said some of the things that I have said about the need to come back to some balance in corporate governance and accounting,” Mr. Donohue told The Times in 2005, “they would open themselves up to extraordinary risk and criticism.”

In a statement following his death, the chamber said Mr. Donohue “gave business a seat at the table and a voice in the debate in a way it never had before.” It added: “It is no exaggeration to say he resurrected the Chamber, taking the institution from good to great and from productive to powerful — and standing up for business from the nation’s capital to every corner of the globe.”

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Thomas Donohue, wearing a dark jacket, white shirt and gray tie, shakes hands with Barack Obama, wearing a dark suit and white shirt, against a bright blue background printed with “U.S. Chamber of Commerce” and “uschamber.com” multiple times in white.

Mr. Donohue with President Barack Obama in 2011 before Mr. Obama addressed the organization. Credit...Jim Young/Reuters

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Thomas Joseph Donohue Jr. was born on Aug. 12, 1938, in Brooklyn, where his father was a production manager for the American Can Company and briefly played for the Brooklyn Dodgers professional football team. His mother, Ruth (Ahearn) Donohue, was a homemaker who had been weakened by rheumatic fever as a child and died at 56.

The family moved to Long Island when he was in the fifth grade.

After graduating from St. Agnes Cathedral High School, in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from St. John’s University. He worked for the Boy Scouts of America and Abilities Inc., an organization that found jobs for wounded World War II veterans, and then received a master’s degree in business administration from Adelphi University, in Garden City, N.Y.

He served as a vice president at the College of New Rochelle, in New York, and at Fairfield University, in Connecticut. One of Fairfield’s directors, E.T. Klassen, became postmaster general in the early 1970s and recruited Mr. Donohue to be his deputy assistant when the Post Office was being converted into the quasi-independent Postal Service.

Mr. Donohue joined the Chamber of Commerce in 1976 and ran the organization’s foundation, membership and grass-roots operations. In 1984, he left to become president and chief executive of the American Trucking Associations. He returned to the chamber in 1997.

In 2022, he was among American business and policy leaders who organized to improve U.S.-China relations.

In addition to his son Thomas, he is survived by two other sons, Keith and John, and five grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Schulz) Donohue, died in 2017.

Mr. Donohue “learned that if you can, you must,” he told the Horatio Alger Association in 2013.

“What I mean by that,” he said, “is that you have to help those who need help, whether it’s someone who works for you or someone you have a relationship with. If they need help and you can do something to make a difference, then you must do it.”

He recalled that when he was 20, his future wife helped him overcome mild dyslexia, teaching him how to read phonetically by reciting the words on signs outside doctors’ offices along Fifth Avenue.

“Some people might say that what happened to me as a child was a negative experience,” Mr. Donohue said. “But I think of it in a positive way. My reading problems made me more verbal. I became a more perceptive person. As a result, I developed skills that have helped me my whole life.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5612604&forum_id=2#48204348)