This is what put the nail in the coffin for Trump, the ‘CEO president’
Several of the people involved have leaked details of efforts to contain the controversy in the final 48 hours before Trump’s business councils imploded
New York — Even before President Donald Trump began speaking at Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, America’s most prominent CEOs knew they had a problem. In the days following the racially charged violence in Virginia, where white supremacists marched with swastikas and a young woman was run down by an alleged Nazi sympathiser, alarmed executives began reaching out to Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire leader of the Blackstone Group and a key figure in President Donald Trump’s business brain trust. What followed was a frantic 48 hours of high-level debate and cold calculation among some of the nation’s most prominent CEOs — from Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase to Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo — that ended abruptly on Wednesday with a remarkable rebuke to the president. Schwarzman, one of the administration’s business ambassadors, listened over the phone this week as one CEO after another expressed dismay over Trump’s response to the deadly events in Charlottesville — and then over his full-t...
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