WASHINGTON
— President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial
crisis of his own making on Wednesday, abandoned by the nation’s top
business executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by
Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va.
The
breach with the business community was the most striking. Titans of
American industry and finance revolted against a man they had seen as
one of their own, concluding Wednesday morning they could no longer
serve on two of Mr. Trump’s advisory panels.
But before Stephen A. Schwarzman,
the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump’s
closest business confidants, could announce a decision to disband Mr.
Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum — in a prepared statement calling
“intolerance, racism and violence” an “affront to core American values” —
the president undercut him and did it himself, in a tweet.
“Rather
than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing
Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Thank you all!”
The
condemnation descended on the president a day after he told reporters
in a defiant news conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan that “alt-left”
demonstrators were just as responsible for the violence in
Charlottesville last weekend as the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who
instigated protests that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman, struck down by a car driven by a right-wing activist.
All
five armed services chiefs — of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the
Marines and the National Guard Bureau — posted statements on social
media condemning neo-Nazis and racism in uncompromising terms. They did
not mention Mr. Trump by name, but their messages were a highly unusual
counter to the commander in chief.
Republicans,
too, issued new denunciations of the hatred on display in
Charlottesville, although some remained vague about Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Vice
President Mike Pence abruptly cut short a trip in South America as his
aides announced he would return home early to attend meetings on Friday
and through the weekend at Camp David. The White House insisted that the
topic of the meetings would be South Asia. During his travels, Mr.
Pence stood by the president but declined to defend Mr. Trump’s comments
at Trump Tower on
Tuesday that “both sides” in Charlottesville were to
blame.
In a tweet on Wednesday night,
Mr. Trump urged supporters to “join me” at a campaign rally scheduled
for Aug. 22 in Phoenix. But the Phoenix mayor, Greg Stanton, said in his own tweet
that he was “disappointed” that the president would hold a political
event “as our nation is still healing from the tragic events in
Charlottesville.” He urged Mr. Trump to delay the visit.
The
president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent
and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s
presidency recovered, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to
do the job.
In
contrast, the president told close aides that he felt liberated by his
news conference. Aides said he seemed to bask afterward in his remarks,
and viewed them as the latest retort to the political establishment that
he sees as trying to tame his impulses.
Mr.
Trump’s venting on Tuesday came despite pleas from his staff, including
his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Instead of
taking their advice to stop talking about the protest, the president
eagerly unburdened himself of what he viewed as political correctness in
favor of a take-no-prisoners attack on the “alt-left.”
On
Wednesday, even Fox News, a favorite of the president’s, repeatedly
carried criticism of Mr. Trump. One Fox host, Shepard Smith, said that
he had been unable to find a single Republican to come on-air to defend
Mr. Trump’s remarks.
No
one from the president’s team has yet to resign in protest, but some
spoke candidly on Wednesday about whether they could continue to work
much longer for a man who has expressed such sentiments. Most incensed
among Mr. Trump’s top advisers, according to three people familiar with
the situation, was Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic
Council, who told people around him that he was offended, as a Jew and
as an American, by the president’s reaction to the violence in
Charlottesville.
The
relationship between the president and Mr. Cohn, who stood next to Mr.
Trump during the news conference, seems to have suffered a serious blow.
Although White House aides denied that he was planning to quit, they
acknowledged that Mr. Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive, was upset
with the president’s lack of discipline.
One
aide who felt energized by the president’s actions was the embattled
White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who shares Mr. Trump’s
anger at the efforts of local governments to remove monuments honoring
prominent Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee. The proposed removal
of a Lee statue on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville
spurred the demonstrations last weekend.
Mr.
Bannon, whose future in the White House remains uncertain, has been
encouraging Mr. Trump to remain defiant. Two White House officials who
have been trying to moderate the president’s position suggested that Mr.
Bannon was using the crisis as a way to get back in the good graces of
the president, who has soured on Mr. Bannon’s internal machinations and
reputation for leaking stories about West Wing rivals to conservative
news media outlets.
Many
in the White House said they still held on to the hope, however slim,
that the new White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, could impose
order on the disarray even as Mr. Trump hopscotches from one
self-destructive episode to the next.
Mr.
Kelly, who watched the president’s performance on Tuesday with his head
hung low, grimacing at some of Mr. Trump’s remarks, is frustrated,
according to people inside the White House.
Several
people who participated in White House conference calls over the
weekend said the chief of staff initially did not seem to fully grasp
the effect of the controversy about the president’s remarks. But as a
former Marine, Mr. Kelly is determined to try to bring order to the
White House, the officials said.
The
White House turmoil intensified as friends and relatives gathered to
memorialize Heather Heyer, woman who was struck and killed on Saturday.
Susan Bro, Ms. Heyer’s mother, told worshipers that her daughter had
been protesting hatred by the nationalist groups when she was killed by
one of them.
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” Ms. Bro said.
Senator
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, denounced “hate and
bigotry” in a statement on Wednesday but made no mention of Mr. Trump or
his comments — an example of the careful line that some Republican
officials are treading as they hope to work with the president on a
conservative agenda in the months to come.
Leaders
of the Republican Jewish Coalition were more direct, calling on Mr.
Trump to “provide greater moral clarity in rejecting racism, bigotry,
and anti-Semitism.” They added: “There are no good Nazis and no good
members of the Klan. Thankfully, in modern America, the K.K.K. and Nazis
are small fringe groups that have never been welcome in the G.O.P.”
David
Shulkin, the secretary of veterans affairs, delivered an emotional
statement to reporters on Wednesday at Mr. Trump’s private golf club in
Bedminster, N.J., where the president is vacationing. Treading carefully
without chiding Mr. Trump, Mr. Shulkin said: “Well, I’m speaking out,
and I’m giving my personal opinions as an American and as a Jewish
American. And for me in particular, I think in learning history, that we
know that staying silent on these issues is simply not acceptable.”
Paraphrasing
famous words from Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and a vocal critic
of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Shulkin said, “First, they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I
wasn’t a trade unionist, so I didn’t speak out. Then they came for the
Jews. I wasn’t a Jew so I didn’t speak out. Then they came for me, and
there was no one to speak for me.”
Many other Jewish members of the Trump administration remained largely silent on Wednesday, even after the protesters in Charlottesville had chanted anti-Semitic slogans and demeaned the president’s Jewish son-in-law, Mr. Kushner.
Steven
Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury, who is also Jewish, stood
silently behind Mr. Trump on Tuesday as the president said there were
“very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. Mr. Mnuchin has not
said anything publicly about the president’s remarks.
Mr. Kushner has been silent about Mr. Trump’s comments. Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism, said in a tweet on Sunday, “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.”
Michael
D. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer, who is Jewish,
denounced hate groups but defended Mr. Trump in response to a reporter’s
question on Wednesday.
“I know President Trump and his heart,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “He is a good man and doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”
Correction: August 16, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the branch of one of the leaders of the armed services who posted on social media condemning racism. It was the chief of the National Guard Bureau, not the Coast Guard.
An earlier version of this article misstated the branch of one of the leaders of the armed services who posted on social media condemning racism. It was the chief of the National Guard Bureau, not the Coast Guard.
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