US: Trump Ends CEO Advisory Councils after top CEOs resign

President Donald Trump’s relationship with the American business community suffered a major setback on Wednesday as the president was forced to shut down his major business advisory councils after corporate leaders repudiated his comments on the violence in Charlottesville this weekend.

Trump announced the disbanding of the two councils — the Strategy & Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Council, which hosted many of the top corporate leaders in the US — amid a growing uproar by chief executives furious over Trump’s decision to equate the actions of white supremacists and counter-protesters in remarks Tuesday at Trump Tower.

Earlier Wednesday, the CEOs of Campbell Soup and the conglomerate 3M resigned from the manufacturing council, as other business leaders faced pressure to take more dramatic action.

​””Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville,” Campbell Soup chief executive Denise Morrison said in announcing her resignation. “I believe the president should have been – and still needs to be – unambiguous on that post.”

As the number of resignations swelled, Trump announced on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that he’d shut down the councils. “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum. I am ending both,” he wrote.

Full Content: The Hill

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