Courtesy of Pam Martens
The Economist Cover, August 19, 2017
Promising to cut corporate taxes, roll back regulations on Wall Street, and get government off the back of business, Donald Trump was enjoying a honeymoon with the stock market and the CEOs of the most iconic brands in the U.S. What a difference four days can make.
Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 274 points. Also yesterday, Trump announced that he was cancelling his business advisory council on infrastructure. That move followed his prior day’s axing of his star-studded CEO councils on manufacturing and Strategy & Policy Forum. According to published reports, Trump was saving face by axing the councils after getting a heads up that the CEOs were leaving en masse.
The rapid move by top CEOs to distance themselves and their brands from the President came after Trump delivered impromptu remarks on Tuesday in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he appeared to equate the KKK and neo-Nazi groups that protested in the weekend Charlottesville, Virginia rally with the protesters opposing them.
The question now is this: if Trump has lost the confidence of big business, exactly what is his presidency about?
On May 19 of this year, Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read news magazines in Europe, published a brutal assessment of the President of the United States. Written by its Executive Editor, Klaus Brinkbäumer, the editorial made the following observations:
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