TIRADE TIPPING POINT FOR TOP EXECS
CEOs abandon Trump panels
President Trump’s defiant Tuesday press conference — where he placed “blame on both sides” for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va. — turned out to be the breaking point for some of the nation’s top CEOs, already fed up with White House controversies and the high-risk, low-reward of serving on ceremonial advisory panels.
“The council never lived up to its potential for delivering policies that lift up working families,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times after resigning from the Presidential Council on Manufacturing.
“In fact, we were never called to a single official meeting, even though it comprised some of the world’s top business and labor leaders,” Trumka wrote. “The only thing the council ever manufactured was letterhead.”
CEOs bolted both the manufacturing council and the Strategic and Policy Forum in the hours after the president’s Trump Tower tirade, where he equated white supremacists in Charlottesville with counter-protesters.
Ten of the 12 members of the Strategic and Policy Forum voted to resign during a conference call yesterday morning, Bloomberg reported.
The manufacturing council was already coming apart at the seams after Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier stepped down following Trump’s immediate reaction to the Charlottesville violence, which he criticized as too weak. Others followed, among them the heads of Under Armour, Intel, Campbell Soup and 3M.
Even though Trump had tweeted that “for every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place,” he decided to disband the panels yesterday, he said, “rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople” of the forums.
“Intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values,” read a joint statement from the council. “We believe the debate over forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans.”
Trump’s Tuesday tirade was the tipping point for many of the execs, although the Strategic and Policy Forum had reportedly barely met since Trump took office. The forum had convened just twice in eight months, and half the members had missed at least one of the meets, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The group wasn’t achieving anything and yet paying a really big price: Its role was being conflated with endorsing everything the president has ever said or done,” a source told the paper.
The news site Axios, citing an anonymous executive involved in the decision to disband, said the CEOs “couldn’t justify the capital they were spending” by remaining on the panels and that their patience for Trump had run out.
“Everyone knew, going in, that this was the way the guy was,” the exec told Axios. “They were just hoping that if he got the right people and decision-making processes in place, he could grow into the job. He proved he has no capability to do that.”
The councils were touted as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to get Americans back to work. But some CEOs have had a short fuse with Trump and his propensity to generate controversy. Tesla’s Elon Musk and Disney’s Bob Iger resigned after the president decided to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Uber’s Travis Kalanick quit the economic advisory committee over Trump’s travel ban.
Both sides, though, will need each other soon, when Trump hopes to unveil his tax overhaul and infrastructure proposals.