“THANK YOU ALL!”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 16, 2017) — At approximately 1:15 PM on Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he will disband two policy advisory councils consisting of corporate CEOs from various industries.
According to NBC Chicago, the second policy group dissolved itself following resignations from the first reportedly over Trump’s responses to the violence altercations in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday.
In his tweet, Trump thanked everyone who had participated.
One group, the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, represented leaders from the U.S. manufacturing sector, while the other was titled the “Strategic and Policy Forum.”
On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged the resignations but resolved to quickly replace them.
On Wednesday, chief executives from Campbell Soup Company and 3M announced their resignations from the MJI “amid fallout over his equivocal response to violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia,” according to NBC.
On Monday, CEOs of Merck and sports company Under Armour had resigned from the same group.
One of Trump’s main goals is to put Americans back to work by cutting taxes and offering incentives to U.S. companies which have outsourced manufacturing jobs over the last several decades because of rising domestic costs. Since Trump took office on January 20, the official unemployment rate has fallen from 4.8% to 4.3%, and a reported one million jobs have been created.
Trump has been roundly criticized by the CEOs, the media, political pundits, and average citizens for what they said they saw as an inadequate response to “white nationalism.”
In a press conference at Trump Tower on Tuesday, Trump said that there was wrongdoing on “both sides” in regard to outbreaks of violence between what appeared to be two factions. In a feisty response to media questions asking if one of the factions was the “equivalent” of “Neo-Nazis.”
Trump said that his understanding of Saturday’s confrontation was that a group concerned about the imminent removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee which had obtained a permit in advance was “attacked” by a group carrying bats and other objects which could do harm. He said that there were “bad people” and “good people” represented in both groups.
Fox News’s Doug McKelway, who was on the ground in Charlottesville that day, has reported that the Charlottesville Police said that they were leaving the area where the protesters were gathered because “it’s too dangerous.”
Speaking of the local police, McKelway said, “They had a chance to nip this thing in the bud and they chose not to.”
After Trump announced on June 1 that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement favored by his predecessor, two CEOs withdrew from the Strategic Policy Forum.
Trump has condemned racists and white nationalists on many occasions, both as president and in the past, which the CEOs did not appear to acknowledge.
Very little was mentioned about groups such as “Antifa” and the Socialist Workers’ Party, which have, respectively, vandalized property at University of California at Berkeley during a rampage and on Monday pulled down a Confederate war memorial honoring child soldiers of the American Civil War.
At the presser on Tuesday, Trump named the person killed in Charlottesville on Saturday and on Wednesday tweeted that she was “a truly special young woman.” Her memorial service is being held today.
