Why are other CEOs still on Trump panel?
Ken Frazier, the chief executive of Merck & Co., may not have meant it this way, but he managed to put about 40 of his fellow corporate CEOs and other business leaders on the hottest of hot seats this week.
On Monday, Frazier resigned from President Trump’s manufacturing jobs council. His aim plainly was to protest Trump’s wholly inadequate response to the violent white supremacist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Va. “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy,” Frazier said in a statement. “As CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.”
Frazier was followed off the panel by five other members: Under Armour’s Kevin Plank and Intel’s Brian Krzanich; Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing; and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Deputy Chief of Staff Thea Lee. Krzanich, Paul and the AFL-CIO officers issued exit statements that explicitly or implicitly referenced Charlottesville and Trump’s response.
Their actions raised a number of questions, but one stands paramount: Why haven’t all the other members of Trump’s jobs council followed their example?
The jobs council, which Trump announced Jan. 27, was composed of some of the glitterati of the corporate world. Present at its inception were the CEOs of Dow Chemical, Dell, Whirlpool, General Electric, Intel, Ford, Boeing and 3M. (Ford CEO Mark Fields retired in May and departed the panel, leaving Ford without representation.)
As is the case with almost all such advisory bodies, getting their names on the list was pretty much the whole point. The council “has yet to hold any real meeting,” the AFL-CIO said this week, which is routine for such PR-driven fronts. It’s crystal clear that even if it does meet, it will be “advising” a patron who doesn’t listen to advice.
Nor is this panel the only
such decorative White House chandelier CEOs are hanging from; there’s a “strategic” council that includes Wall Street CEOs such as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and IBM’s Ginni Rometty.
The longer any of these people remains on the council, moreover, the more Trump’s policies and behavior will get hung around their necks. One of the first CEOs to act on this realization was Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, who resigned from the jobs and strategic councils June 1 after Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Musk tweeted, “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world” — advice that Trump, obviously, ignored. Disney CEO Robert Iger resigned from the strategic council around the same time and on the same grounds. Uber’s Travis Kalanick left the strategic council in February, in response to Trump’s travel ban.
This week I reached out to most of the 25 companies still represented on the jobs council (the others didn’t seem to have usable contact numbers or emails). Eight corporations and the union responded.
Whirlpool said its CEO, Jeff Fettig, is staying on the council to “represent our industry, our 15,000 U.S. workers, and to provide input and advice on ways to create jobs and strengthen U.S. manufacturing competitiveness.” Dell said there’s no change in CEO Michael Dell’s membership. The steel company Nucor said it would remain on the council. Lockheed Martin said it had no comment. Whirlpool, Nucor and Dow, at least, coupled their responses with condemnations of bigotry and violence and nods toward their corporate cultures of inclusiveness and tolerance.
General Electric issued its own pro forma condemnation of “hate, bigotry, or racism,” but said its chairman, Jeff Immelt, will remain on the board until his retirement Dec. 31 because “it is important for GE to participate in the discussion on how to drive growth and productivity in the U.S.” It didn’t say, however, how it can participate in the discussion through membership on a council that doesn’t meet.
Boeing said its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, will stay on the council, though bizarrely it asked me to source the information to an “exclusive” interview given to Fox Business Network, which isn’t the best way in the world for the company to put some distance between itself and Trump.
What is demonstrated by some of these responses — and the silence from other council members — is corporate America’s devotion to totally vacuous gestures. But it becomes clearer with every passing day that lending their credibility to Trump is dangerous, to their own reputations, to the U.S. economy and to the health of the republic.
It’s hard to believe that anyone who could rise to the summit of a major American corporation would be dense enough to believe that he or she could influence Trump through membership on a sham committee, but that’s the impression they and their companies are trying to communicate. The truth is, of course, that Trump has no jobs policy to be influenced, other than filling print columns and the airwaves with bogus business development projects that will cost taxpayers massively more than they return, such as the Wisconsin electronics plant I reported on last week.
The best argument against joining these front groups comes from Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Clinton and chief economist to President Obama. Back in June, Summers said on Bloomberg TV that there is a difference between volunteering one’s advice to a president, and “lending your prestige and that of your company to joining an advisory board of his creation. That is accepting a presidential appointment.”
Staying on the boards, he argued, makes the members complicit with Trump policies and actions. “There’s an immigration ban, there’s arithmetic that doesn’t add up, there’s climate change, there’s crony capitalism and selective deals.” A mass resignation from the presidential committee would get Trump’s attention, he added. “Make no mistake, the decisions business leaders make send a very powerful signal both to the rest of the world and the president.”
In a column Tuesday in the Financial Times, Summers urged all the remaining members on both councils to send that signal by resigning. He dismissed the usual argument that it’s worthwhile to have “a seat at the table” when important economic issues are being discussed.
“Give me a break,” Summers wrote. “Anyone who thinks that by attending a meeting less than monthly with 30 people in a room they are moving the nation is engaged in egotistical self-delusion of a high order.”
One can understand a CEO’s reluctance to expose his or her company to an outbreak of nasty tweets like the ones that Trump issued attacking Frazier after his resignation, just to wriggle off an “advisory” council that does nothing anyway. But we’ve reached the point where that facile approach will no longer do.
Pro forma statements expressing dismay at racist violence and at hatred and bigotry are only the stuff of media relations. The day will come when American corporations will be asked what they did to fight back at Trump’s entire platform — not merely what they said. Until the companies still on Trump’s business councils abandon him, the answer will be: “We did nothing.”