2 White House CEO Forums Disband Amid Fallout Over Trump's Charlottesville Responses

The White House’s Manufacturing Advisory Council (MAC) and its Strategic and Policy Forum (SPF) disbanded Wednesday amid continued fallout over President Donald Trump’s response to a weekend white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counterprotester dead (see 1708140044). Trump said during a Tuesday news conference in the Trump Tower lobby on his executive order to streamline the environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects (see 1708150067) that both the white supremacists and “alt-left” counterprotesters were to blame for the Charlottesville violence. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich resigned from the MAC Tuesday after an earlier Trump response to the incident (see 1708150020). “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople” on MAC and SPF, “I am ending both,” Trump tweeted. Dell CEO Michael Dell was still on the council at the time of dissolution. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and other SPF members decided prior to Trump's tweet to disband that group, with Rometty saying in a memo “this group can no longer serve the purpose for which it was formed.”