After Schwarzman Discusses Disbanding Council, Trump Does It For Him
Image by Getty Images
By Aiden Pink August 16, 2017
President Donald Trump announced in a tweet on Wednesday that he was shuttering two of his business advisory councils after numerous CEOs on those bodies resigned due to their opposition to the president’s continued comparisons between white supremacist marchers and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va.
“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!” Trump’s personal account posted.
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the investment firm the Blackstone Group, was the chairman of the president’s Strategic and Policy Form and had been described by The New York Times as “one of Mr. Trump’s closest confidants in the business community.” But after Trump’s remarks on Tuesday doubling down on his original, much-maligned Charlottesville reaction, Schwarzman held a conference call of CEOs to discuss either ending the group or having more CEOs engage in a mass resignation.
A similar call for members of the American Manufacturing Council was reportedly going to take place Wednesday afternoon, the Times reported.
Already, eight CEOs on that group had resigned due to Trump’s controversial statements, including directors of Merck, Intel, Under Armour, 3M, Campbell Soup and the AFL-CIO union federation.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
