BUSINESS/GOP/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The bar for a chief executive of a public corporation to repudiate a United States president is extraordinarily high. Corporate leaders aren’t given their power, prestige, responsibility and nine-figure pay packages to use the corner office as their personal soapbox.
With President Trump’s comments on white supremacists and other right-wing extremists ringing in the ears of America’s chief executives, that high bar appears to have been passed.
This week, what had been a trickle of defections from the White House business advisory councils over issues like immigration and climate change turned into a torrent. By Wednesday [8-16-17], both of the councils had collapsed; Mr. Trump insisted that he had decided to disband them.
Such a public schism between a president and a business leadership long considered the backbone of the Republican establishment left corporate historians at a loss for precedent. ‘There’s never been anything to compare to this,’ said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a dean of leadership studies at the Yale School of Management and the author of ‘Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound From Career Disasters.’
Charles M. Elson, a professor and director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said he knew of no other examples, not even involving Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War protests and during Watergate.”
-James B. Stewart, “C.E.O.s Long Avoided Politics. Trump Is Changing the Calculus.,” The New York Times online, Aug. 16, 2017