Trump Loses Corporate America
There is no point in taking brickbats for a president who does not deliver.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
The Wall Street Journal
August 16, 2017
Companies get in bed with politicians when it serves their interests and are quick to run away when it doesn’t. Thus nobody is obliged to interpret the flutter of CEOs away from President Trump’s advisory council since the Charlottesville riot as occasions of courage.
Still, these are some of America’s most delicate PR canaries, surrounded by risk-averse advisers. Mr. Trump’s administration is turning out not to be the administration they were hoping for, though probably the one they realistically expected.
Especially he has not made headway on corporate taxes—the issue that bought him whatever benefit of the doubt America’s CEO class was willing to give him.
Now a handful are fleeing his advisory council because he didn’t say the right words over Charlottesville, or didn’t say them quickly enough. This is big news because the media can’t get enough Trump. He insists on making himself the lightning rod. That’s one problem.
If the president or a scraggly someone close to him in the West Wing is soft on white supremacists because he thinks these groups are a vital bloc, this would be the miscalculation of the century. Their adherents couldn’t swing a race for dogcatcher. It is precisely the left’s fantasy of the right that these people constitute a useful electoral base.
None of the departing CEOs likely believe Mr. Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer. They just see no upside to being associated with him. Two of those who quit, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier and Intel ’s Brian Krzanich, implicitly cited an unnamed individual’s failure to speak out forcefully enough against racism.
Kevin Plank of Under Armour perhaps indulged a greater honesty when he suggested his company belatedly remembered that it “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”
There may be a temptation to liken these men to Google’s Sundar Pichai, who overnight acquired a reputation as a moral coward for firing a diversity-policy dissenter. Other CEOs, like Jeff Immelt of GE, found voices to express opposition to white racism without trying to turn themselves into symbols of anti-Trump resistance.
But Mr. Trump hardly helped with his response, a series of tweets about Merck’s high drug prices. Mr. Trump is the one party to these exchanges who doesn’t have three layers of advisers to help him discover his deepest thoughts. If he did, he might not be frittering away his presidency.
But let’s also notice how little this has to do with Charlottesville. Mr. Trump was essentially correct when he warned in his initial, widely panned comments, about danger from “many sides.” In one of those quirks of old-style magazine publishing, the Atlantic dropped a story, dated September, that went to press before Charlottesville and yet details the “The Rise of the Violent Left,” especially the Antifa movement that was in the middle of the Charlottesville brawl.
Mr. Trump, who perhaps actually paid attention to his Charlottesville briefing, may just have responded the way 99% of Americans would have to the full story. Or the way European publics in the 1920s and ’30s did when they saw Hitlerites and Stalinists battling in the streets and wanted nothing to do with either.
Happily, the social and political condition of America today is nothing like Germany circa 1930, even as both extreme right and extreme left peddle exactly the same delusive line that Trumpism is the force somehow carrying them to the centers of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively.
To the extent there’s any truth to this, however, notice what the Atlantic chose as its subject: “Antifa’s violent tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left,” which in the magazine’s reporting includes the Nation and Slate.com.
The overwhelming American sentiment after Charlottesville will be “Where were the cops?” Charlottesville is a Democratic town, in a state run by a Democratic governor. Its mayor, Mike Signer, declared the city a “capital of resistance” shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Its vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, last year was obliged to step down from a high-school teaching job because of misogynistic, homophobic and antiwhite tweets.
The Atlantic quotes a pollster’s finding that 71% of Democrats detected “fascist undertones” in the Trump campaign. If the Hitlerites were spoiling for a fight in Charlottesville, they likely lacked any sway with the town fathers to keep the path clear for them. Perhaps not so the left-wing activists of Antifa.
At least the question is worth asking. Nobody is responsible for anticipating that a lone nut will drive a car into a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters. But for some reason, the city’s leaders failed to head off an antifascist rumble they saw coming from a long way off—and that arguably they had a duty to head off once they issued, however reluctantly, a legal rally permit to the white-supremacist groups.
Companies get in bed with politicians when it serves their interests and are quick to run away when it doesn’t. Thus nobody is obliged to interpret the flutter of CEOs away from President Trump’s advisory council since the Charlottesville riot as occasions of courage.
Still, these are some of America’s most delicate PR canaries, surrounded by risk-averse advisers. Mr. Trump’s administration is turning out not to be the administration they were hoping for, though probably the one they realistically expected.
Especially he has not made headway on corporate taxes—the issue that bought him whatever benefit of the doubt America’s CEO class was willing to give him.
Now a handful are fleeing his advisory council because he didn’t say the right words over Charlottesville, or didn’t say them quickly enough. This is big news because the media can’t get enough Trump. He insists on making himself the lightning rod. That’s one problem.
If the president or a scraggly someone close to him in the West Wing is soft on white supremacists because he thinks these groups are a vital bloc, this would be the miscalculation of the century. Their adherents couldn’t swing a race for dogcatcher. It is precisely the left’s fantasy of the right that these people constitute a useful electoral base.
None of the departing CEOs likely believe Mr. Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer. They just see no upside to being associated with him. Two of those who quit, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier and Intel ’s Brian Krzanich, implicitly cited an unnamed individual’s failure to speak out forcefully enough against racism.
Kevin Plank of Under Armour perhaps indulged a greater honesty when he suggested his company belatedly remembered that it “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”
There may be a temptation to liken these men to Google’s Sundar Pichai, who overnight acquired a reputation as a moral coward for firing a diversity-policy dissenter. Other CEOs, like Jeff Immelt of GE, found voices to express opposition to white racism without trying to turn themselves into symbols of anti-Trump resistance.
But Mr. Trump hardly helped with his response, a series of tweets about Merck’s high drug prices. Mr. Trump is the one party to these exchanges who doesn’t have three layers of advisers to help him discover his deepest thoughts. If he did, he might not be frittering away his presidency.
But let’s also notice how little this has to do with Charlottesville. Mr. Trump was essentially correct when he warned in his initial, widely panned comments, about danger from “many sides.” In one of those quirks of old-style magazine publishing, the Atlantic dropped a story, dated September, that went to press before Charlottesville and yet details the “The Rise of the Violent Left,” especially the Antifa movement that was in the middle of the Charlottesville brawl.
Mr. Trump, who perhaps actually paid attention to his Charlottesville briefing, may just have responded the way 99% of Americans would have to the full story. Or the way European publics in the 1920s and ’30s did when they saw Hitlerites and Stalinists battling in the streets and wanted nothing to do with either.
Happily, the social and political condition of America today is nothing like Germany circa 1930, even as both extreme right and extreme left peddle exactly the same delusive line that Trumpism is the force somehow carrying them to the centers of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively.
To the extent there’s any truth to this, however, notice what the Atlantic chose as its subject: “Antifa’s violent tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left,” which in the magazine’s reporting includes the Nation and Slate.com.
The overwhelming American sentiment after Charlottesville will be “Where were the cops?” Charlottesville is a Democratic town, in a state run by a Democratic governor. Its mayor, Mike Signer, declared the city a “capital of resistance” shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Its vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, last year was obliged to step down from a high-school teaching job because of misogynistic, homophobic and antiwhite tweets.
The Atlantic quotes a pollster’s finding that 71% of Democrats detected “fascist undertones” in the Trump campaign. If the Hitlerites were spoiling for a fight in Charlottesville, they likely lacked any sway with the town fathers to keep the path clear for them. Perhaps not so the left-wing activists of Antifa.
At least the question is worth asking. Nobody is responsible for anticipating that a lone nut will drive a car into a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters. But for some reason, the city’s leaders failed to head off an antifascist rumble they saw coming from a long way off—and that arguably they had a duty to head off once they issued, however reluctantly, a legal rally permit to the white-supremacist groups.
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