Joe Nocera, Columnist

Go Ahead, CEOs. Criticize Trump. He Can't Hurt You.

He can rant against you on Twitter. So what?

August 15, 2017 at 1:29 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."

That was then.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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At 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, Merck tweeted the news that its chief executive, Kenneth Frazier, was resigning from President Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council, a body made up of executives who are supposed to advise the president on how to bring back the manufacturing sector. He was doing so to “take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” Frazier said in the statement, something Trump at that point had failed to do in the wake of the weekend riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It took the president only 54 minutes to respond with his own tweet. It was harsh, of course: