Business Leaders Must Denounce Trump’s Racist Remarks

By Tom Coleman

The absence of a response by American business leaders to the President’s recent racist attacks on four minority women Members of Congress and Congressman Elijah Cummings is shameful. Two years ago many business leaders resigned from White House advisory boards after Trump failed to condemn white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville where one young bystander was murdered. This time, after a series of hateful racists tweets, press availabilities and a re-election rally where he amplified his attacks on the women, there is deafening silence from the business community.

This blasé attitude by business leaders toward Trump’s vicious attacks is unacceptable and unwise. Leaders of companies should be concerned about their stakeholders including shareholders, customers, and employees as well as maintaining their brand and dealing with risks to the company’s future. Failing to condemn Trump’s abusive rhetoric will only embolden the president to move from the gutter down to the sewer. In this instance, failure to condemn is to concur and therefore, become complicit in supporting the downward spiral in our democracy.

Trump’s lies about and racist attacks on the four congresswomen of color are not popular with most Americans. A USA Today /Ipsos poll last week found that 65 percent of Americans believe it’s racist to tell minority Americans to “go back to where they came from.” Forty-five percent of Republicans agree. A large majority of the stakeholders cited above would be included in these findings. Corporate leaders should recognize their responsibility by calling out the president on his racist diatribe. This is a no brainer when the vast majority of the public believes these are racist comments.

Many, if not most, of our major corporations are international in scope. They sell products and services around the world. They should care about how the rest of the world views American leadership. But as the former British Ambassador recently wrote in a leaked document, the Trump administration won’t “become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” Yet business leaders remain silent.

Through his racist attacks, Trump has weaponized the nation’s immigration policy apparently to keep as many as possible non-white, non-Christian people from seeking asylum in the United States. One would expect this policy change would have a significant impact on companies and even threaten to disrupt their operations. Yet business leaders remain silent.

Corporate leaders will undoubtedly be confronted with shareholder requests at their annual shareholder meetings calling on the company to pass Board of Director resolutions condemning racist comments from all sources, including those from the President of the United States. More resolutions will follow to increase gender, race and minority diversity in their employee ranks and on their Board of Directors. Leaders may have to respond as to why they remained silent when four women and a respected Chairman of a congressional committee investigating the president are racially attacked.

There are more women activists than men and are better organized and vote in greater numbers. Corporate leaders will have to learn to deal with it.

Business leaders should take a lesson from Mr. Peter Harf, Managing Partner and Chairman of JAB Holding Company, whose product line includes the Krispy Kreme, Keurig and Dr. Pepper brands. JAB was formed from a German company that had a checkered past during the Nazi era.

In a New York Times interview last year, Mr. Harf noted that he has lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”

“This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”

He said there are not enough voices in business speaking up. Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”

Mr. Harf reminds us that businesses have in the past enabled nationalists and populists. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today,” he said. Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

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Tom Coleman is a former Republican Member of Congress from Missouri and an attorney. He has served as an adjunct professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and at American University.

Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press via Los Angeles Times
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) held a news conference in the Capitol on Monday to respond to President Trump’s tweet that they should go back to their “broken” countries. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)