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Updated: Aug 18, 2017 4:38 PM ET

Another presidential advisory committee appears to be breaking up.

Actor Kal Penn, artist Chuck Close and the entire membership of the President's Committee On the Arts and Humanities have announced their resignation. A letter dated Friday, and signed by 16 of 17 committee members, cited the "false equivalence" of President Donald Trump's comments about last weekend's "Unite the Right" gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump has blamed "many sides" for the demonstrations that left an anti-racism activist dead.

"Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions," the letter reads. "Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too."

The only member whose name did not appear was Broadway director George C. Wolfe. Representatives for Wolfe at Creative Arts Agency said Friday that he was also resigning and that his name would be added to the letter, which seemed to contain a hidden political message beyond the ones stated openly. The first initials of the letter's six main paragraphs spell out "r-e-s-i-s-t."

Earlier this week, two business advisory councils were disbanded as members left in protest.

The arts and humanities committee was established in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan and, with the first lady serving as honorary chair, works with both government and private agencies in promoting the arts through such programs as Turnaround Arts and Save America's Treasures. Others signing the resignation letter included Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri; and Vicki Kennedy, widow of Edward M. Kennedy. All were appointed by President Barack Obama.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

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President Trump's Entire Arts and Humanities Council Just Quit - TIME

Most business executives fumed and groused for the eight years Barack Obama was in the White House. He was a former community organizer who had never met a payroll, and those in the corporate boardrooms thought he was no friend of free enterprise.

In 2010, New York real estate and media tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman said Obamas demonization of business was discouraging investment and sapping job growth. Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Technology Association, called Obama the most anti-business president in my lifetime. Former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch implored the president, Stop it. You cant go industry by industry ...through intimidation, business by business by business.

As ordeals go, though, theirs was notably mild. The stock market soared, corporate profits nearly tripled and the unemployment rate declined to 4.8 percent from 7.8 percent. From the depths of the Great Recession, the economy began what is now the third-longest expansion on record. If making money was your goal, the Obama years were a good time to do it.

Now, instead of a liberal lawyer in the White House, CEOs have one of their own. And theyre finding its not everything they had hoped. The stock market and other economic indicators look about the same as they did before Donald Trump took office. In Obamas final six months, the economy added an average of nearly 181,000 jobs per month. In Trumps first six months, it added 179,000 per month. Gross domestic product growth has even slowed a bit.

More troublesome at the moment is Trumps insistence on defending Confederate monuments and stoking white racial resentments. In recent days, so many CEOs resigned from the presidents two business advisory councils that Trump closed them down. Some of the executives no doubt were genuinely upset at the presidents coddling of bigots and his inability to behave with a dignity befitting his office. Some were fearful of alienating customers who find Trump toxic.

Other business executives are edging away from the president as though he were an erratic panhandler, and for the same reason: Best not to be close to him if he flips out. You dont want to have to stand there in silent mortification, as White House chief of staff John Kelly had to do the other day, while the president makes a fool of himself on national TV. It would not be good for your company or your career.

But even before Trumps Charlottesville debacle, he was not covering himself with capitalist glory. His January travel ban order put him at odds with some 100 tech firms that sued to block it, arguing, It disrupts ongoing business operations. And it threatens companies ability to attract talent, business, and investment to the United States.

His decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord didnt go down well with many big companies, 25 of which had signed a letter urging him to stay in. Even oil giants Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips opposed the withdrawal. In abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Trump spurned the recommendation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. His insistence on renegotiating NAFTA has the Big Three automakers worried about their supply chains.

A lot of executives applaud Trumps war on federal regulation. But what else has he done for them? His failures on Obamacare have generated uncertainty among insurance companies and health care providers. His sour relations with Congress make tax reform less plausible every day. Infrastructure is what he was supposed to focus on Tuesday when he appeared before reporters at Trump Tower. But he buried that issue by venting about Charlottesville.

Perhaps worst of all, he has been the arrogant bully that Jack Welch and others accused Obama of being. Trump slammed Boeing over the cost of Air Force One. He blasted Ford over a planned factory in Mexico. He has repeatedly attacked Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. He went after Nordstrom for dropping his daughters products. When Mercks Kenneth Frazier quit his manufacturing advisory group Monday, Trump flamed him for ripoff drug prices.

His recurring message is that any executive who doesnt do as Trump wishes can expect retribution from the most powerful man on Earth. Obama was not the friend CEOs think the president of the United States should be. But in Trump, theyre finding out what its like to have a real enemy.

Steve Chapman, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/chapman.Download "Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century" in the free Printers Row app at http://www.printersrowapp.com.schapman@chicagotribune.comTwitter @SteveChapman13

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Donald Trump, the anti-business president - Chicago Tribune

It would be nice to believe that Steve Bannons departure from the White House will end, or least diminish, Donald Trumps flirtations with bigotry. Alas, thats almost certainly not the case.

Bannon's Exit Leaves Trump Untethered

As Trump himself likes to note, Bannon joined his campaign late, in August 2016. By that time, Trump had already called Mexican immigrants rapists, falsely accused American Muslims in New Jersey of celebrating the 9/11 attacks, said Islam hates us, and declared that Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly judge the case against Trump University because was Mexican American. Bannons hiring was not a cause of the Trump campaigns dalliance with Islamophobia, nativism, and white nationalism. It was a result.

In fact, Trump has been exploiting bigotry since before he hired Bannon, before he ran for President, before he even entered public life. In 1973, at the age of 27, Donald Trumpthen President of Trump Managementwas sued along with his father for discrimination against African Americans by the Justice Department. In 1989, when four African American and one Hispanic teenagers (the Central Park Five) were arrested for rape, Trump took out newspaper ads declaring that the accused should be executed and forced to suffer. When DNA evidence exonerated the young men in 2012, Trump denounced New York Citys decision to compensate them, saying I think people are tired of politically correct. As late as 2013, he still tweeted, Tell me, what were they doing in the Park, playing checkers?

Steve Bannon was not advising Donald Trump when Trump demanded to see Barack Obamas college transcripts and launched a crusade to prove that he was not an American citizen. Bannon was not advising Trump in 2013, when the real estate tycoon tweeted that, Im much smarter than Jonathan LeibowitzI mean Jon Stewart or told Republican Jews that, Youre not going to support me because I dont want your money. And in recent weeks, as Bannon has reportedly lost influence, Trump has not become any less racially inflammatory. His Tuesday press conference about Charlottesville, and his Thursday tweet suggesting the United States should look to a false story of U.S. Army General John Pershings supposed war crimes in the Philippines as the right model for how to treat suspected Muslim terrorists, all occurred while he was reportedly weighing Bannons firing. Indeed, reporting suggests that the thing that really bothered Trump about Bannon was his penchant for stealing the spotlight. Not his religious and racial views.

Perhaps, on issues on which Trump has no strong beliefs, Bannons departure could make a difference. But Steve Bannon did not teach Trump what to think about Muslims, blacks, women, and Jews. When it comes to religion, gender, and race, Trump developed his views long ago. The only way he might change them would be if he grew convinced that they are hurting him politically. And probably not even then.

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Steve Bannon's Departure Won't Change Donald Trump - The Atlantic

He's had a handful -- two-ish? -- weeks that could reasonably be described by neutral observers as "good." The rest of his weeks as President fall somewhere between not very good and disastrously bad.

Below, I've ranked Trump's six worst weeks. (I am defining a week for the purposes of this discussion as Monday-Sunday.) What weeks did I miss? Send me an email at cillizza@cnn.com and I'll add to this post if need be!

Thus began a months-long (and still ongoing) attempt by Trump's senior staff to find something (anything!) that backed up this claim. So far: Nothing.

After his White House works to trace the Comey firing to a memo outlining his many mistakes in the 2016 election penned by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Trump does an interview with Lester Holt in which he tells the NBC anchor: "What I did is I was going to fire Comey, my decision. I was going to fire regardless of recommendation. (Rosenstein) made a recommendation. He's highly respected. Very good guy, very smart guy, the Democrats like him, the Republicans like him, he made a recommendation. But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey."

Technically, this week isn't over yet -- Trump still has 48 hours to make it even worse. But, even if he does nothing bad between now and Sunday, the damage done to not only to his presidency but also the Republican party and the country is significant.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump has been president for 30 weeks. This is the worst one. - CNN

The year was 1979 and the 33-year-old Trump, hungry to build what would come to be known as Trump Tower, had bought the aging Bonwit building and planned to knock it down. Standing nine floors above the street below, though, were two large Bas-Relief Art Deco sculptures. In an ordeal that even Trump admitted caused him problems, the real estate developer would tear the sculptures down, horrifying art and culture experts in New York and landing him on the front page of The New York Times.

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments," Trump wrote over two tweets. "You can't change history, but you can learn from it."

He added: "Also, the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

Trump, born and raised in Queens, had long dreamed of moving his family's outer borough real estate company to Manhattan. And nothing would signal his rise to prominence more than putting his name on a soaring building on Fifth Avenue.

In "Art of the Deal," the businessman-turned-politician's 1987 book, Trump writes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked him if he would donate the sculptures in 1979, shortly before he was about to demolish the Bonwit building.

"I said that if the friezes could be saved, I'd be happy to donate them to the museum," Trump writes.

But then cost and time got in the way.

Trump recalls that his crew came to him and told him the panels were "a lot heavier" than they thought. To save them, Trump writes, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would delay the project by "several weeks."

"I just wasn't prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a few Art Deco sculptures that I believed were worth considerably less, and perhaps not very much at all," he writes. "So I ordered my guys to rip them down."

It took mere hours for New York's art world to react with horror

Ashton Hawkins, the vice president of the board at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told The New York Times at the time that Trump's decision was "extraordinary."

"We are certainly very disappointed and quite surprised," Hawkins said in a front-page Times piece titled "Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures".

A later New York Times editorial would savage Trump: "Obviously big buildings do not make big human beings, nor do big deals make art experts."

Even the young Trump was surprised by the reaction.

"What I didn't count on was the outrage this would create," he wrote. "It was not the sort of publicity you like to get. Looking back, I regret that I had the sculptures destroyed."

He added: "I'm not convinced they were truly valuable ... but I understand now that certain events can take on a symbolic importance. Frankly, I was too young, and perhaps in too much of a hurry, to take that into account."

Trump has offered varying opinions on the origins of violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia left one counter-protester and two police officers dead. The conflict between white supremacists and counter-protesters centered on the city's attempts to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Trump, during a confrontational news conference on Tuesday, suggested that if statues to Lee were to come down, former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next.

"You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop," he said.

Trump later said that taking down statues like that would fundamentally alter history.

"You're changing history," he said. "You're changing culture."

Trump is not shying away from a debate over Confederate monuments and his top White House aides are pushing the debate on Twitter and in interviews.

That Bannon's theory that any discussion of Confederate monuments is politically beneficial for Trump has striking similarities to the lesson Trump took away from the Bonwit building controversy.

"Ironically, the whole controversy may have ended up being a plus for me in terms of selling Trump Tower," Trump wrote, noting that future stories would not draw "a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower" and help sell apartments.

"I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all," Trump wrote. "Controversy, in short, sells."

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The time Donald Trump wasn't worried about the 'history and culture' of sculptures - CNN