Then president-elect Donald Trump walks out to make a statement at Mar-a-Lago Club on December 28, 2016.
By Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
For many critics of Donald Trump,
there were two best-case scenarios for his presidency. The first was
that he might induce the unlikely political realignment that his
populist campaign seemed to promise: a European-style fusion of
nationalism with staunch support for the welfare state. In this
scenario, Trump would build the wall and renegotiate tougher trade
deals, but he would also protect Medicaid and work with Democrats to
pour money into infrastructure projects around the country. At its core
was the premise that Trump is not an ideologue and might be uniquely
positioned to positively disrupt an ossified political establishment.
This, it quickly became obvious, would not happen.
Instead, Trump quickly adopted a traditional Republican platform
focused on tax cuts and deregulation. Which leads to the second
best-case scenario: that Trump, a political neophyte motivated by
glad-handing and deal-making, might be uniquely positioned to help
implement a center-right, pro-business agenda. And indeed, his
presidency seemed to start off this way. The stock market soared as
Trump made peace with Paul Ryan,
set about unshackling Wall Street, and assembled several business
advisory councils, convening the nation’s top C.E.O.s for photo-ops and
brainstorming best practices for cutting America’s red tape. The
presence of so many millionaires and billionaires in his Cabinet may
have seemed gaudy, even unseemly, but at least it suggested that Trump
wouldn’t succumb to his more apocalyptic impulses. Markets largely
ignored the president’s rumblings about trade wars with China or Mexico
(or Canada or Germany), secured by the presence of Trump handlers like
former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn.
In the last week, however, the wheels have come off the Trump train in spectacular fashion. The same executives who saw their proximity to the president as a net benefit to their shareholders abruptly changed their calculus when Trump drew a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazi white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend and the protesters who stood up to them. In a press conference at Trump Tower on Tuesday, the president returned to his first reaction to the violence, telling reporters “I think there is blame on both sides.” Cohn, among the other White House advisers who were assembled alongside him, having expected to discuss an infrastructure plan, looked distraught. Chief of staff John Kelly, who had recently joined the West Wing in hopes of bringing some military discipline to an unruly group, stared glumly at the floor.
A groundswell of criticism and shock followed from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including former presidents, world leaders, and even members of Trump’s own staff. By Wednesday, a dozen or so of the business leaders who had bolstered Trump’s credibility in his first weeks in office, and were to serve as the lynchpin of his tax-reform campaign, decided to disband their advisory councils in protest. On Thursday, the White House said that it would scrap a third corporate advisory group—the yet-to-be-fully-formed Council on Infrastructure—which was only officially established last month. An incorrect tweet claiming that Cohn would be resigning caused the stock market rally to falter, with the benchmark index dropping half a point and Treasury yields falling 0.7 percent before recovering when the rumor was quickly debunked.
The brief stumble exposed how fragile the business community’s faith in Trump has become. Since before the election, the bull case for the Trump presidency was that the real-estate mogul would surround himself with the same stabilizing, charity-circuit set that he mingled with back in New York. In the past week, however, Trump has become increasingly isolated, relying on an ever-smaller circle of loyalists as polite society has turned its back on him. On Tuesday, according to The Washington Post, three fund-raising pillars decided to pull out of events at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The American Cancer society, which has held its annual event there for the past eight years, said its "values and commitment to diversity" led to its decision to hold the upcoming gala elsewhere. The American Friends of Magen David Adom, which is one of the club’s biggest events with roughly 600 attendees, also said it would not to use Mar-a-Lago as the venue for its 2018 gala after "considerable deliberation." The Cleveland Clinic, which had, as recently as this month, said it would host its ninth gala there, reversed course on Wednesday, after 1,600 health professionals said that booking the event there "symbolically and financially supports a politician actively working to decrease access to health care," the Post reported. (The clinic’s chief executive also happened to sit on Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, one of the groups that disbanded this week.)
Even before Trump’s widely derided Charlottesville statements, seven other groups that had, in the past, hosted events at Mar-a-Lago had announced that they would be taking their business elsewhere. This amounts to the slowest stretch for charity events at the club in a decade, according to the Post. That will cost the Trump Organization a pretty penny, since each of the galas brings in between $100,000 to $275,000. The president opted to not divest from his global business empire when he took office, relinquishing day-to-day control to his two sons. The whole family retains a financial stake.
Back in the Washington swamp, however, one Trump property isn’t feeling a pinch. Trump’s International Hotel in Washington, just five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, has raised room rates and drink prices in order to keep pace with the overflowing demand for all-things Make America Great Again. On any given night, members of Trump’s Cabinet and inner circle will gather in the lobby, and revelers hoping to get a taste of the action have ponied up $25 for cocktails and nearly $700 per night for rooms to drink it all in. And while foundations may be shying away from Mar-a-Lago, conservative organizations, and even a Supreme Court justice aren’t pulling back from their D.C. haunt. Only two weeks before the court takes up Trump’s travel ban case, Trump’s appointee to the bench, Neil Gorsuch, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Fund for American Studies 50th anniversary event at the end of September.
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