Trump support seen as eroding
CEOs represent latest sector turning on president
It was more than just political fallout when several top business leaders turned against President Trump this week, a response to his saying “both sides” were responsible for the violence during a white supremacist demonstration in Virginia.
The CEO revolt led to Trump dissolving two business advisory panels and is another sign he is losing the power of the presidential bully pulpit even among constituencies that were supposed to be in his corner. The march of defections will make it even tougher for him to pass his agenda, as his self-inflicted wounds are crippling the GOP’s chance to reshape policy
while it controls Congress and the White House, analysts said.
“He’s using his bully pulpit to undermine, at best, his fellow Republicans, or at worse the entire American experiment,” said Tammy Frisby, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “It has kept Republicans as the party of opposition — but against the president, who is a member of their own party. Their move into the party of governance hasn’t happened.”
The list of allies who are turning on Trump continues to grow. A crucial three GOP senators defied him on the vote to repeal and replace Obamacare. The military, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, pushed back on his call to ban transgender personnel from service. Hardline conservatives like Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., who are typically supportive, called out Trump for what they labeled his tolerance of racism this week.
“White supremacy, bigotry & racism have absolutely no place in our society & no one — especially POTUS — should ever tolerate it,” Moran tweeted Tuesday.
Even at Trump-friendly Fox News, anchor Shepard Smith said Wednesday that the network “couldn’t get anyone to come and defend him here” after his comments about Saturday’s deadly demonstration in Charlottesville, Va.
“Let’s be honest,” Smith said Wednesday on-air, “Republicans don’t often really mind coming on Fox News Channel.”
In California, Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton (Orange County), who endorsed Trump last year but is now facing a tough reelection fight, called out the president, tweeting Tuesday that “The President needs to clearly and categorically reject white supremacists. No excuses. No ambiguity.”
The parade of denunciations culminated Wednesday as fellow business executives criticized Trump after his heated back-and-forth with reporters at Trump Tower on Tuesday about who was to blame for the violence in Charlottesville. The president had been counting on them to support his promised plan to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and revamp its tax system, presumably with cuts that would disproportionately help the nation’s wealthiest people, according to nonpartisan analysts.
Trump disbanded both the Strategic and Policy Forum and the American Manufacturing Council on Wednesday, after the CEOs of Merck, Intel, Under Armour and several others began leaving the manufacturing group. Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier was the first to leave Monday, saying his was a stand “against intolerance and extremism.”
In July, Trump praised Frazier as a “great, great business leader.” That wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s tweeted response to Frazier’s exit: “Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”
He disparaged the departing CEOs as “grandstanders,” tweeting that “For every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place. Grandstanders should not have gone on. JOBS!”
Recruiting new members might have been tougher than Trump anticipated.
A few hours after several members of the Strategic and Policy Forum, which included executives from BlackRock, General Electric, General Motors and IBM, huddled to figure out whether to stay, Trump dissolved the group and sought to make it appear as though it was his idea.
“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Members of the policy forum didn’t see it quite that way.
“Intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values,” forum members said in a statement. “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. As such, the president and we are disbanding the forum.”
“I strongly disagree with President Trump’s reaction to the events that took place in Charlottesville over the past several days. It is a leader’s role, in business or government, to bring people together, not tear them apart,” forum member and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, a longtime Democratic donor, said in a note to company employees Wednesday after the council was dissolved.
But Trump supporters are fighting back, releasing an online fundraising video describing the president as a victim of the media and Democrats, despite that party’s role as the minority in Washington and most state houses.
“Democrats: obstructing. The media: attacking our president. Career politicians: standing in the way of success,” a narrator says as images of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., liberal cable news pundits and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, flash across the screen. “But President Trump’s plan is working.”
And Gina Roberts, a member of the California Republican Party Central Committee in San Diego County, said she still supports the president even after he announced his military transgender ban on the same day she was about to undergo another round of gender reassignment surgery.
“My blood pressure shot up that day,” Roberts said. But she remains behind Trump, saying that her conservative values supersede her LGBT identity.
While she dismisses this week’s criticism as being drummed up by the liberal media, Roberts said Trump’s comments about Charlottesville “didn’t help himself.”
“He hasn’t done a lot of things to make his life easy,” she added.