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Following a number of CEOs pulling out of President Trump's American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum, President Trump tweeted that the initiatives have been ended:
Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!
The CEOs of Merck, Intel, 3M, and other companies had already left:
3M Co. Chief Executive Officer Inge Thulin stepped down from the White House's manufacturing council, adding to the corporate exodus as the backlash grows to President Donald Trump's ambivalent response to racially-charged violence in Virginia over the weekend.
Thulin joined the White House panel in January "to advocate for policies that align with our values and encourage even stronger investment and job growth -- in order to make the United States stronger, healthier and more prosperous," the CEO said Wednesday in a statement tweeted by 3M. "After careful consideration, I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance these goals."
Update: The members of the Strategic and Policy Forum reportedly disbanded the group before President Trump's tweet:
The quick sequence began late Wednesday morning when Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump's closest confidants in the business community, organized a conference call for members of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum. On the call, the chief executives of some of the largest companies in the country debated how to proceed. After a discussion among a dozen prominent C.E.O.s, the decision was made to abandon the group altogether, said people with knowledge of the details of the call.
Also at Bloomberg:
Trump made the announcement on Twitter, less than an hour after one of the groups was said to be planning to inform the White House that it would break up. [...] Trump appeared to be making an effort to get ahead of the news as the councils began to disintegrate. The strategy forum, which is led by Blackstone Group LP's Stephen Schwarzman, planned to inform the White House Wednesday before making the announcement public, according to another person familiar with the matter, who wasn't authorized to discuss the news publicly.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RedBear on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:51PM (3 children)
I love the update to this soooo much. Just like when he tried to claim (after Nieto's announcement) that he and the President of Mexico had "mutually" decided to postpone his visit to the White House, which was a lie, he is once again attempting to claim this huge embarrassing loss as a win, as if it was his choice. But this wasn't what he wanted. He was bragging just yesterday that there were plenty of other great CEOs and business leaders who would jump at the chance to join his committees in place of those who were resigning. But clearly every member of those committees was about to finally resign in protest of his support of neo-Nazis and white supremacy, and this was the only way he could save face. Sad.
Anybody that's left in any other Trump administration committees now realizes that they have to take their chance to make a stand sooner rather than later. The rest of the CEOs who failed to resign before Trump's announcement have now lost the opportunity to appear to have backbones. They'll still make the announcement that they were going to quit, but it will have little impact. This was a PR coup for the CEOs of Merck, Intel, 3M and Under Armor for being the first to abandon a sinking ship. They certainly won't be the last.
In a very dark-humor sort of way I am really loving this administration. Baltimore just removed all of their Confederate statues in the dead of night last night after they've been up for 70 years. They've been up since Jim Crow times, put up by Jim Crow racists who engaged in revisionist history to pretend that the Civil War wasn't about the right to enslave non-white human beings. Now thanks to Donald J. Trump, they are going to be coming down all around the country. Not even Ronald Reagan or the Bushes were able to unite the country like this against racism. It's beautiful.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:31PM (1 child)
I think quitting over the neo-nazi business was basically an excuse. It made good PR, which let them get *some* mileage out of that council. I believe the real reason they quit was that it was a waste of time. He didn't listen to their proposals, but only wanted them to do what he said.
OTOH, I don't have any inside information. I could easily be wrong. But that's what makes most sense to me.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:51PM
I appreciate your intellectual honesty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:04AM
Hah, yeah. My feelings exactly.
I see Trump as an unintentional version of (excuse the anime reference) Lelouch from Code Geass [wikipedia.org], who (spoiler alert) overthrew his father, declared himself Emperor of the World, and raised the oppression dial up to eleven specifically to force everyone else to unite against him and bring him down.