CEOS QUIT; TRUMP ABOLISHES PANELS
With corporate chieftains fleeing, President Donald Trump abruptly abolishes two of his White House business councils — the latest fallout from his combative comments on Charlottesville, Va.
WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the White House’s economic advisory council and manufacturing council have been dissolved — panels that consisted of business leaders from firms such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, IBM and PepsiCo. The decision came after a wave of the manufacturing council’s members chose to resign.
“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!” Trump said on Twitter.
The chief executives of 3M and Campbell Soup were the last to announce their departures before Trump’s tweet. Shortly afterward, General Electric confirmed that its chief had sent his resignation to Trump on Wednesday morning. The CEOs of Merck, Under Armour and Intel had quit Monday, and on Tuesday, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing trade group and two AFL-CIO members left.
The exodus from the panels followed Trump’s comments about last weekend’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., in which white supremacists and anti-racist counterprotesters clashed. Trump initially did not say that hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis were behind the violence. And on Tuesday, he again faulted “both sides” — a contention at odds with local police accounts.
JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon said the policy council decided on its own to disband, and he delivered a rebuke to Trump in describing why he backed that decision.
“I strongly disagree with President Trump’s reaction to the events that took place in Charlottesville over the past several days,” he said Wednesday in a memo to employees. “Racism, intolerance and violence are always wrong. … There is no room for equivocation here.”
Marlene Towns, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, said stepping away from Trump probably was an easy decision.
“Brand managers go to great lengths to protect the brand of a company, and they want the brand kept as far away from that controversy as possible,” Towns said.