CEOs react to Trump’s Charlottesville shame
American business leaders are already showing reactions to the controversial response of President Donald Trump to the violent events at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The top boss of Merck & Co Incorporation - one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies – was one of the first to react to Trump’s failure to condemn the white nationalists for Saturday’s outbreak of violence in Charlottesville, which left one dead and more than a dozen injured.
Kenneth Frazier, Merck CEO and chairman, announced on Monday that he would leave Trump’s American Manufacturing Council because of the president’s controversial position.
This led to an increase of about 1 percent in stock prices of the company, its biggest jump in nearly in a month.
Frazier, an African-American, was quoted by media as saying that he was leaving the council because US leaders must "clearly reject expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy."
Trump was quick to criticize the move by writing on Twitter soon after Fraizer’s announcement, that the CEO “will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”
Other top business leaders also spoke out in reaction to the violence in Charlottesville.
"Lincoln: 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' Isolate those who try to separate us. No equivalence w/ those who bring us together," Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tweeted on Monday morning, Reuters reported.
Several executives from top US companies have stepped down from a number of presidential advisory councils in protest to Trump policies, Reuters added.
Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk and Walt Disney Co CEO Robert Iger left the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a business advisory group, in June, after Trump said he would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Musk also left the manufacturing council.
Former Uber Technologies Inc CEO Travis Kalanick quit the business advisory council in February amid pressure from activists and employees who opposed the administration's immigration policies.
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