Four CEOs quit Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council over his response to a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville – and that was before the president renewed the controversy on Tuesday by furiously reverting to his original position that the counter-protesters share the blame for the violence.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?” Trump said at a press conference in New York Tuesday afternoon. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
After that, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka joined the CEOs of Merck, Under Armour, Intel and the Alliance for American Manufacturing in leaving the council.
“We cannot sit on a council for a president who tolerates bigotry and domestic terrorism,” Trumka said in a statement. “President Trump’s remarks today repudiate his forced remarks yesterday about the KKK and neo-Nazis. We must resign on behalf of America’s working people, who reject all notion of legitimacy of those bigoted groups.”