The war against CEOs is officially on

Business leaders hate being involved in controversy. So when you find them writing newspaper stories protesting unfair treatment, something’s up.

Pfizer’s (PFE) CEO Ian Read complained in the Wall Street Journal recently about the Treasury Department’s “ad hoc and arbitrary attempt to single out” his company, referring to the new Treasury rules that killed Pfizer’s $160 billion merger deal with Irish drugmaker Allergan (AGN). “To be pilloried as ‘deserters’ when we are trying to stay competitive on a global stage so that we can continue to invest in the U.S. is wrongheaded,” Read wrote plaintively.

On the same day, General Electric (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt published a defense of his company in the Washington Post, rebutting criticism from Bernie Sanders, who said GE is “doing a very good job avoiding the taxes.” Immelt pointed out that GE employs more than 1,000 people in Sanders’ home state of Vermont, and basically told the Democrat presidential hopeful to back off. “We’ve never been a big hit with socialists,” Immelt jabbed. “We create wealth and jobs, instead of just calling for them in speeches.”

And in Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to shareholders, released this week, the J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) CEO said bad decisions by policymakers are one of his top concerns. “Bad public policy … creates risk for the economies of the world and the living standards of the people on this planet,” Dimon wrote. He singled out the huge national debt, new banking rules he feels have gone too far, and the inability of Washington politicians to solve problems.

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There’s often tension between corporate leaders whose job is to maximize profits and politicians able to exploit voter anger toward the corporations they run. Much of the time it’s just rhetoric between public role-players who are cozy with each other in private. But we’re now seeing animosity toward big business migrate into policy and regulatory decisions likely to affect companies directly instead of just fading into the cable-news cacophony. The people want blood, and politicians seem intent on serving it up.

A lot of CEOs must have thought this moment was over a few years ago. The 2008 financial crisis put corporate America, and Wall Street banks in particular, in an unusually vulnerable position. President Obama reflected the mood of the country in 2009 when he came into office railing on fat-cat bankers. The 2010 passage of the Dodd-Frank banking reforms was a stunning reversal for an industry previously able to scuttle such onerous rules. The anti-Wall Street “Occupy” movement peaked in 2011 with protests in New York and several other cities.

The anti-business sentiment seemed to die down as the economy recovered and more Americans went back to work. A dominant theme of the 2016 elections, however, is the anger of voters who feel they have not participated in the economic recovery of the last seven years. Sanders has surprised mostly everybody with the popularity of a campaign built on screeds against J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs (GS), GE, and even Apple (AAPL). Donald Trump has found the same sort of success on the Republican side, repeatedly bashing companies like Pfizer, Ford (F), Carrier (UTX) and Eaton (ETN). Hillary Clinton has evolved from a free-trade supporter to a free-trade equivocator, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal with12 other countries now looks highly endangered—both Trump and Clinton, the leading presidential contenders, say they’re against it.

The Obama administration’s surprisingly tough new rules against corporate “inversions”—the sort of merger Pfizer planned with Allergan, in order to reduce the amount of taxes paid in the United States—show a late-term president acting on the animosity he seems to personally feel toward corporate America. Treasury had tried twice before to clamp down on inversions, but toughened its rules for a third time as American companies continued to pursue them. Obama called inversions “insidious” and chided Pfizer for trying “to get out of paying their fair share of taxes here at home.” That’s the language that prompted the Pfizer CEO’s op-ed about “wrongheaded” thinking. But Obama won.

There will be many more accusations flung at corporations—and some flung back at politicians—during the next seven months of the presidential campaign. What comes after that will be the real test of how much new resistance corporate America faces. If it’s President Trump, new tariffs on imports and a clamp-down on free trade will be among the first orders of business. If President Clinton, the former friend of Wall Street, has vowed to impose new fees on financial firms and higher taxes on certain types of business.

Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones has formed a nonprofit group called Just Capital to explore new ways to improve the image and behavior of corporate America. Part of his motivation is to head off the unhappy consequences that can erupt when the entrenched become too powerful. Jones has warned that in the past, friction between haves and have-have-nots has often led to “ higher taxes, revolution or war.” He forgot to add: the disdain of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.