The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website August 21, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: The 2016 election represented, as much as anything else, a repudiation of America’s elites and everything they believe in. By running on the hollow promises of populism, nativism and isolationism, an angry outsider challenged many of the bipartisan shibboleths that have long united most of the highly educated and affluent leaders of our country and culture.
Seven months into President Trump’s reign, the elites are striking back. From Wall Street to West Palm Beach and West Hollywood, the past week has been a turning point, perhaps even a tipping point. Since Trump abdicated his moral leadership after Charlottesville, the well-connected have used their leverage — like checkbooks and celebrity — to send a message about what truly makes America great.
The growing number of groups canceling galas, stars boycotting ceremonies and chief executives resigning from advisory boards is further isolating Trump.
People in his orbit say the president has been in a sour mood about all of this. He stormed the barricades, but now he’s the one under siege. Unlike most of the criticism he’s engendered since taking office, the past week has actually impacted his bottom line. The value of the Trump “brand,” which he once said is worth billions, has taken a bath since he declared that some “fine people” were protesting alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the University of Virginia.
— Afraid of losing major contributors, a stampede of charities has canceled planned fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida:
On Thursday, the Cleveland Clinic, American Cancer Society and American Friends of Magen David Adom pulled out.
On Friday, the Salvation Army, American Red Cross and Susan G. Komen joined them.
On Saturday, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach canceled its dinner dance that had been scheduled for next March. This alone probably represents a quarter-million in lost revenue.
On Sunday, the Palm Beach Zoo and an elder care organization called MorseLife both announced that they will not hold their annual fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago.
Both the Palm Beach Habilitation Center and the Kravis Center are calling emergency board meetings for early this week to discuss whether to keep their events at the club, per today’s Palm Beach Post.
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“If he returns to the club for weekends next winter, the president could often find its grand ballrooms quiet and empty,” Drew Harwell and David Fahrenthold report. “One of the cancellations cut close to home for the Trumps. Big Dog Ranch Rescue said Friday it would no longer hold an upcoming event at the club and would instead move it to the group’s facility nearby. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was scheduled to co-chair the event.”
— The White House announced on Saturday that neither the president nor first lady Melania Trump will attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors in December. For the first time since the award was created in 1978, they also will not invite the honorees over for a reception beforehand.
That came after three of the five honorees — television producer Norman Lear, singer Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade — said they would or may boycott the traditional reception. “As for the other two, rapper LL Cool J had not said whether he would attend, and Cuban American singer Gloria Estefan said she would go to try to influence the president on immigration issues,” per David Nakamura, Amy B Wang and Peter Marks.
On Friday, the members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced their resignation en masse. “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” they wrote in an open letter. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”
With so many consequential stories in the news, it can be easy to dismiss the intrigue swirling around a ceremony for Hollywood stars. After all, we’ve got Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia to worry about. But Trump’s decision to pull out of the Kennedy Center honors more than three months ahead of time is significant.
The 2017 Kennedy Center honorees: Carmen de Lavallade, Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie and Norman Lear. (File Photos/Reuters)
Make no mistake, Trump cares deeply about these snubs. He has spent his entire life trying to get onto the A-list. He’s a Queens kid who has tried hard to win acceptance in Manhattan. The pomp and circumstance of the presidency were big draws when he chose to run. He was genuinely excited about the ceremonial duties of the office after he unexpectedly won the election. More than most presidents, whatever he may say to the contrary, he has shown a love for ceremonies like the one at the Kennedy Center.
What he does not like, and goes to great lengths to avoid, is public humiliation. After his experience at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, when Barack Obama and Seth Meyers ridiculed him from the stage, he announced that he’d skip this year’s. He didn’t throw the ceremonial first pitch at the Nationals home opener, as past presidents have, because he was afraid of getting booed.
As an alpha male, Trump seems to take special satisfaction when people who are richer, cooler and better looking than him kowtow. It seems silly to have to write this, but it’s true: Having his ring kissed seems to be one of Trump’s favorite parts of the job. But there’s not been very much ring-kissing lately.
— Trump fancies himself a great businessman, but most truly elite business executives have never seen him as in their league. He’s a former reality television star and a developer who ran a family real estate business, failing spectacularly in Atlantic City and driving companies into bankruptcy. The true titans of industry, so-called masters of the universe, have said privately that they see him as a wannabe. But most tried to make nice after the election to advance their interests and get access.
Risking their stock prices, many chief executives spoke out last week. It started with Merck’s Kenneth C. Frazier, who quit the president’s American Manufacturing Council as “a matter of personal conscience.” Citing “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” Frazier made it harder for others to justify staying in the tent. Many other chief executives then received heavy pressure from their employees and predecessors to follow suit.
By the end of the week, the manufacturing council, the president’s Strategy & Policy Forum and an infrastructure council had all disbanded. Trump attacked Frazier on Twitter, then ripped the other chief executives as “grandstanders” and finally – bizarrely and falsely — claimed that he had chosen to disband the councils, not the other way around. The net effect was to undercut Trump’s image as a leading figure in the business world who commanded the respect of fellow chief executives.
Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post business writer, believes that last week’s resignations from the advisory councils are “likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution of American capitalism — an acknowledgment from some of the nation’s top corporate executives that the single-minded focus on maximizing profits and share prices that has been their mantra for the past three decades is no longer politically viable or morally acceptable.”
“It is unlikely that any of smiling executives who posed for photographs with the president this spring at the first meeting of the White House Strategic and Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative had been enthusiastic supporters of candidate Trump,” Pearlstein wrote in Sunday’s paper. “Publicly, most had opposed the president’s positions on immigration, trade, climate change and gay rights. Privately, many thought him unsuited for the job. Nonetheless, the president’s economic advisers had convinced the executives that they would be able to help shape the administration’s economic program. And the executives were eager to lend their support and legitimacy to administration efforts to boost their profits by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. …
“Now, after decades of preaching that what was good for General Motors is good for America, corporate leaders have acknowledged that it might actually be the other way around — that what’s good for America is good for General Motors,” he concludes. “However belated the conversion, their action this past week was courageous and impactful. We owe them our gratitude.”
— It’s not just Trump. The elites who tied their fortunes to Trump are on the defensive like never before – under pressure from fellow elites.
On Friday, more than 300 people who also graduated from Yale University in the class of 1985 urged Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to resign. “We understand that graduates of Yale College have served the United States proudly … and that rarely, if ever, have any of us made such a request of a classmate, whatever our differences in political opinion have been,” they wrote in a letter. “We do so today because President Trump has declared himself a sympathizer with groups whose values are antithetical to those values we consider fundamental to our sacred honor as Americans, as men and women of Yale, and as decent human beings. … We can disagree on the means of promoting the general welfare of the country, on the size and role of government, on the nature of freedom and security, but we cannot take the side of what we know to be evil. … We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.”
On Saturday, the Treasury Department issued a 582-word response from Mnuchin. In it, he strongly condemned the racism and hatred that was on display in Charlottesville. “As someone who is Jewish, I believe I understand the long history of violence and hatred against the Jews (and other minorities) and circumstances that give rise to these sentiments and actions,” Mnuchin wrote. “While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the President, I feel compelled to let you know that the President in no way, shape or form, believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways …
“I don’t believe the allegations against the President are accurate,” the secretary concluded, “and I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the President in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.”
— The Mnuchin letter generated a great deal of additional pushback from elites over the rest of the weekend, including this from former treasury secretary and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers last night:
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