Joe Nocera, Columnist

CEOs Flee Trump Because He's Useless to Them

Businesspeople want tax cuts and deregulation. They don't expect help from the Oval Office.

August 16, 2017 at 11:10 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

Wasting their time.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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One by one, some of the most important people in corporate America lined up on Wednesday to criticize the president of the United States. Though many of them didn't utter Donald Trump's name, they didn't need to. Everyone knew they were talking about Trump’s repugnant "both-sides-are-bad" response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend.

"What we saw there was domestic terrorism," said Laurence Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock Inc., the giant investment management company, in a memo to employees that was quickly leaked to the press. "It cannot be accepted, and it cannot be tolerated."