General Motors CEO Mary Barra won’t be advising Donald Trump any longer – at least not as a member of the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, as the committee has disbanded.
In a reversal of his previous position, Trump tweeted yesterday: “Rather than
putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council
& Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both.”
The Forum was a panel of high-level executives from various industries, including GM’s Barra, former Boeing chief Jim McNerney, Disney chairman Bob Iger, and Walmart president Doug McMillon. It also used to include former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk of Tesla fame, however both stepped down earlier this year citing disagreements with the Trump Administration – Kalanick over immigration policies, and Musk over the Paris climate accords.
Musk also served (alongside former Ford chief Mark Fields) on the President’s Manufacturing Council, which has been disbanded alongside the policy forum. The dissolution of both advisory boards comes as President Trump faces backlash over his treatment of the recent incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a white supremacist from the Alt-Right camp drove into a crowd of anti-fascist demonstrators, killing one and injuring several more.
“General Motors is about unity and inclusion and so am I,” Barra said in a statement cited by Automotive News. “Recent events, particularly those in Charlottesville, Va., and its aftermath, require that we come together as a country and reinforce values and ideas that unite us — tolerance, inclusion and diversity — and speak against those who divide us — racism, bigotry and any politics based on ethnicity.”
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