DISBANDING OF PRESIDENTIAL COUNCILS: A TURNING POINT FOR THIS PRESIDENT?

…Merck’s Ken Frazier was the first to start the rush of CEO’s leaving Trump’s CEO Advisory Committee.

 

The ‘elites” from across America are hitting back at Trump.

 

If you think back to who was most affected by the election of Donald J. Trump, it wasn’t his core supporters.  Remember, Trump barely won the electoral college compared to previous presidential elections, and he did lose the popular vote by 3 million votes.  And today, his approval rating has been in the 30+% area for months.

 

No, those most affected were what is sometimes referred to as “America’s elites” that received the brunt of the issues from Trump’s hollow promises of populism, nativism and isolationism.  You will recall that Trump was the angry outsider that had challenged those individuals that had previously united the highly educated and affluent leaders of our country and of our culture.

 

Well, it looks like those groups of individuals are starting to strike back.

 

At only seven months into his term, the so called “elites” from Wall Street to West Palm Beach and West Hollywood are hitting back.  This past week became a turning point, perhaps even a tipping point for these elites.

 

Since Trump totally relinquished his moral leadership after the Charlottesville riots, those well-connected elites have used their leverage to make their point.  That leverage includes their checkbooks and their celebrity for sending a message about what it was that truly made America great.  And please note, it's not the slogans and Trump’s red baseball caps.

Today there is a  growing number of well-heeled groups canceling gala events at Trump hotels and resorts, and Hollywood and sports stars are boycotting televised award ceremonies.  Chief executives were resigning in droves from Trumps advisory boards.  This is of course just isolating Trump even further from getting done in Congress what he had falsely promised during his election campaign..

 

So, how is this effecting the new Commander-in-Chief?

People close to Trump are saying that the president has been in a sour mood about all of this. He had originally stormed those elite imaginary barricades, but now he’s the one that’s under serious siege. Unlike most of the criticism he’s engendered since taking office, the past week is being called his worst week ever and it has actually impacted his Trump business’ bottom line.

 

The value of the Trump “brand,” which he once said was worth billions, has taken a serious bath since he declared that some “fine people” were protesting alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the Charlottesville riots.  The 22 minute Vice News Documentary of the Charlottesville riots has shown that yes, there was violence from both sides of the event.  But it was the Neo-Nazi’s and White Supremacists that came seriously armed, and they were the ones shouting Nazi /anti-Jewish slogans, they were the ones that also carried and waved the Swastikas and the Confederate flags.   Yes, those on the left got into the brawl, but they did not drive the car into the crowd that killed a young woman and seriously injured so many others.

However, those elites are now fighting back.  As an example, the Trump Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach has already lost close to a million dollars in future events that have been cancelled in just this last week.  And from what we are hearing, the rejections have only just begun.  A stampede of major charities has canceled planned fundraising events.  Just last Thursday, the Cleveland Clinic, American Cancer Society and American Friends of David Adom cancelled their events.  On Friday, the Salvation Army, American Red Cross and Susan G. Komen joined them.  On Saturday, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach canceled its dinner dance that had been scheduled for next March. This event alone probably represents a quarter-million in lost revenue.  On Sunday, the Palm Beach Zoo and an elder care organization called MorseLife, they both announced that they will not hold their annual fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago.  Both the Palm Beach Habilitation Center and the Kravis Center are calling emergency board meetings to discuss whether to keep their events at the club.  This is all per the Palm Beach Post.

 

If the president spends weekends there next winter, as he did this year, the president will find his ballrooms very quiet and mostly empty.  One of the cancellations did cut close to home for the Trumps. The Big Dog Ranch Rescue said Friday it would move its event to the group’s facility nearby. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was previously scheduled to co-chair the event.”

 

Now, you will also recall that one of Trump’s promises was to get us out of any war conflicts that were left by the previous two administrations.  Well, let’s see how these “elites” responded when Trump announced that he is approving increasing American troops being sent to Afghanistan, the longest war in US history.

In another event, in order to get ahead of the stampede of the stars, it was announced that  President Trump and first lady will this year not attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors in December.  The US president has always been the unofficial host of this annual event.  But amid all those that were to receive a life-time award, some had already said they would boycott the event because of President Trump.  This was probably a good call by the Trumps.  However, for the first time since the award was created in 1978, the first family will not have the honorees to the White House for a reception lunch beforehand.

 

This decision was made after three of the five honorees, television producer Norman Lear, singer Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade, had said they would boycott the traditional White House reception.  The other two honorees, rapper LL Cool J and Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan had not yet decided, but the peer pressure would probably have been too heavy to not join the other three.

 

As to the president’s advisory councils, the members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, they all had announced their resignation en masse. “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” they wrote in an open letter. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”

 

With so many negative stories in the news, it can be easy to dismiss the noise around a ceremony for a group of Hollywood stars. After all, we’ve got Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia to worry about. But Trump’s decision to pull out of the Kennedy Center honors more than three months ahead of time is highly significant.

 

Let’s face it. Trump must care deeply about all these snubs. He has spent his entire life trying to get onto the elite’s A-list. He knows he’s a Queens kid who has tried hard to win acceptance in downtown Manhattan. The pomp and circumstance of the presidency were big deals when he chose to run. He was totally excited about the ceremonial duties of the office after he unexpectedly won the election. More than most presidents, whatever he may say to the contrary, he has shown a love for gaudy, posh ceremonies like the big one at the Kennedy Center.

 

Trump does not like, and he goes to great lengths to avoid ever apologizing or for experiencing any public humiliation.  This is especially after his experience at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, when President Obama ridiculed him from the stage.  After the election, he announced that he’d skip this year’s Correspondent’s Dinner. He also didn’t throw the ceremonial first baseball pitch at the Nationals home opener, as past presidents have always done.  That was because he was afraid of getting booed, which he assuredly would have been.

 

As the classic alpha male, Trump seems to take special satisfaction when people who are richer, cooler, and better looking than him, bow to him. This seems silly, but it’s true: Having his ring kissed seems to be one of Trump’s favorite parts of any job. But based on his poor presidential performance, there has been very little ring-kissing since the election.

 

And to make these matters that much worse, President Trump's had to disband the two major CEO councils after Trump was slow to condemn the white supremacy groups.  Trump disbanded these groups before the CEO’s would have embarrassed him by all of them dropping out, which was already happening.  Trump was just able to get ahead of the mob of those CEO’s resigning.

 

So, why is this happening to this president?

 

Trump has always fancied himself as a great businessman, but those truly elite business executives have never seen him as being in their league. They realize that all he is, is a former reality television star and a developer who ran a family real estate business with no BOD to report to.  His businesses failed spectacularly in Atlantic City and he drove his companies into bankruptcy four times. The true titans of industry, those so-called “Masters of the Universe”, have said privately that they see him only as an executive wannabe. Why else would you build all your buildings with your name attached in large gold letters?  Most of the real business titans have tried to make-nice with Trump since the election.  But that was only to advance their interests and to obtain access to the high office.

However, the making of space between the real executives versus the wannabe started last week.

 

It started with Merck’s Kenneth Frazier, who quit the president’s American Manufacturing Council as “a matter of personal conscience.” Citing “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” Frazier made it harder for others to justify staying in the tent. Many other chief executives then received heavy pressure from their employees and their executive predecessors to follow suit.

By the end of the week, the manufacturing council, the president's Strategy & Policy Forum and an infrastructure council had all been disbanded by Trump. 

,

Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post business writer, believes that last week’s resignations from the advisory councils are “likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution of American capitalism, an acknowledgment from some of the nation’s top corporate executives that the single-minded focus on maximizing profits and share prices that has been their mantra for the past three decades is no longer politically viable or morally acceptable.”

 

Let's hope Pearlstein is correct and this is not over.  There is much more to come.

 

Watch this space.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017