President rips execs who quit jobs panel

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday ripped into the four business leaders who resigned from his White House jobs panel — the latest sign that corporate America’s romance with Trump is faltering — after his equivocal response to violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.

“They’re not taking their job seriously as it pertains to this country,” the president said at an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York City.

The president denied that his original statement about the violence in Virginia on Saturday was the cause of the departures.

“Some of the folks that will leave, they’re leaving out of embarrassment because they make their products outside” the United States, he said.

Trump also assailed the CEOs who left on Twitter as “grandstanders” and said he had plenty of executives available to take their place.

But the parade of departing leaders from the informal panel seems closely linked to how the president responded to events that led to the death of a counterprotester that opposed the white supremacists.

The chief executives who have left are Kenneth Frazier of Merck, Kevin Plank of Under Armour and Brian Krzanich of Intel, and Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest group of labor unions in the country, also quit Trump’s manufacturing council Tuesday evening, with the labor leader saying he refused to accept any tolerance of “bigotry and domestic terrorism,” the Washington Post reported.