Throughout American history, businessmen and chief executives have often involved themselves in some manner with politics.
For example, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, recently completed a term as the chair of former President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
According to Allan Chernoff of CNN, Immelt tried to invigorate trust in Obama’s economic plan, as he pushed for a focus on green energy technology and for American companies to strive to export more manufactured goods.
This is pretty standard behavior for most businessman advisors, as presidents always want to find allies in the corporate world to help promote their own economic agendas.      
However, there has never really been a moment in U.S. history quite like right now, when a large group of chief executive officers (CEOs) who had committed to advising President Donald Trump decided to leave his Manufacturing Council and his Strategy & Policy Forum.
As a cover up, Trump “decided” to disband both councils, but it was after the CEOs had already quit. The reasons for the CEOs leaving made a clear indication of how they felt about the chances of Trump successfully moving forward with his political agenda.
The recent departures began with the exit of Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. Frazier said he decided to leave based on Trump’s comments regarding the recent incidents in Charlottesville.
An article in Business Insider argued Frazier’s decision prompted immediate condemnation from Trump via Twitter. However, many other executives in the pharmaceutical industry supported Frazier’s decision. This began a steady mass exodus from the members of the Manufacturing Council and the Strategy & Policy Forum.
The question we are left to ask is why did this event push executives to abandon these advising positions? Trump has said and done things throughout his presidency that did not play well in the media, yet the advisors stood their ground.
The key difference now is these businessmen have lost confidence in the president’s ability to pass the legislation he promised back in January.
The promised legislation dealt with issues such as deregulation, tax cuts and infrastructure spending, all of which whetted the appetites of corporate leaders. These expectations were reflected most prominently in the consistently increasing Dow Jones Industrial Index, which recently passed the 22,000 mark.
This increase is highly touted by the White House as a positive sign for the American economy. Despite these high expectations from the business world, in an article for Bloomberg View, Joe Nocera pointed out the event as a potential turning point for the administration due to these executives deciding it was best to cut their losses and leave.
It has become increasingly clear to America that the current administration does not seem capable of legislating their way out of a paper bag.
The grand legislative plans the White House presented at the beginning of the year becoming less and less likely to materialize. The health care repeal failed and there has been little to no movement on tax reform or infrastructure spending. 
These failures have not gone unseen by the leaders of corporate America, which is why they now feel emboldened to up and leave the advisory councils.
Of course, Republicans still control both houses of Congress, so there is still a chance that corporate America could see the passage of legislation affecting them positively.     
Nonetheless, it has become quite obvious the leading chief executives in the U.S. have realized the promised aggressive legislative plan of the Trump Administration is unlikely to come to fruition.