WH jobs advisory councils dissolve after Trump's Charlottesville comments

Two business groups advising the Trump administration have dissolved in the wake of President Donald Trump’s third round of comments on last weekend’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Trump failed to unequivocally condemn the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville and several days later made startling comments that were perceived as making excuses for the white nationalists. A woman died on Saturday after a white supremacist allegedly drove deliberately into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

In response, business leaders withdrew their companies from two major advisory groups, the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategy & Policy Forum. Trump has claimed that he wanted to close the two advisory councils himself.

Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

"Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville," Campbell Soup chief executive Denise Morrison, who was part of the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, said on Wednesday.

If Trump had refrained from making his follow-up comments earlier this week, the jobs advisory councils probably would have stayed intact.

“That’s the problem that Donald Trump has, that he can’t constrain himself,” Bill O’Reilly said on Thursday’s “The Glenn Beck Radio Program.”

O’Reilly and Glenn Beck had a heated debate over the reasoning behind the business leaders’ decisions to leave the jobs council.

“If you walk away because far-left groups say to you, ‘If you don’t, we’re going to organize a boycott against your company’ … our democracy is shot,” O’Reilly asserted, saying that companies who crumble under the pressure are in the wrong.

“I agree with that; however, that’s not the world we currently live in,” Glenn objected, explaining why business leaders have no incentive to stand with Trump when it damages their company.

To see more from Glenn, visit his channel on TheBlaze and listen live to “The Glenn Beck Radio Program” with Glenn Beck, Pat Gray, Stu Burguiere and Jeffy Fisher weekdays 9 a.m.–noon ET on TheBlaze Radio Network.