NEW YORK—Even before U.S. President Donald Trump began speaking at Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, America’s most prominent CEOs knew they had a problem. In the days following the racially charged violence in Virginia, where white supremacists marched with swastikas and a young woman was run down by an alleged Nazi sympathizer, alarmed executives began reaching out to Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire leader of the Blackstone Group LP and a key figure in Trump’s business brain trust. What followed was a frantic 48 hours of high-level debate and cold calculation among some of the nation’s most prominent CEOs — from Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo Inc. — that ended abruptly Wednesday with a remarkable rebuke to the president.Read more:Trump increasingly isolated as business panels dismantled over Charlottesville remarksExodus of firms fleeing president will soon include Trump Hotels: MochamaThe complete transcript of Donald Trump’s stunning Tuesday remarks on racist violence in CharlottesvilleSchwarzman, one of the administration’s business ambassadors, listened over the phone this week as one CEO after another expressed dismay over Trump’s response to the deadly events in Charlottesville — and then over his full-throated attack on a prominent Black executive, Kenneth Frazier of Merck & Co., who, unlike many CEOs, had refused to remain silent.A conference call on Wednesday morning cemented the decision: The CEOs would disband a White House forum that Trump, the first CEO president, assembled to showcase his supposed rapport with big business.This account of the struggle to contain the controversy is based on interviews with numerous people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the talks.As the violence unfolded in Charlottesville over the weekend, uneasiness among the execu ...
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