The Slatest

Today’s Impeach-O-Meter: Does Anyone Care What CEOs Do?

Donald Trump with (from left) PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra at the White House on Feb. 3.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In the tradition of the Clintonometer and the Trump Apocalypse Watch, the Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.

So many CEOs resigned or were ready to resign from Donald Trump’s two corporate advisory councils today that one of the councils self-disbanded just before Trump announced, in a face-saving move which did not save face, that he had totally decided to dissolve them both, you can’t fire me because I quit, etc.

This raises the question: Who cares?

On the one hand: A Republican president that Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street executives don’t want to be seen with even as he’s preparing to cut taxes is a politically toxic president indeed. Politicians also don’t generally love headlines along the lines of Everyone Is Abandoning [Name of Politician] Because He’s Objectively Pro-KKK.

On the other hand, to quote my colleague Jim Newell, “It doesn’t hurt Trump’s support to have corporations trash him. It happened daily for two years, and then he won the presidency. This is all a public show, and the Republican government and these corporations are still very much on the same team.”

Both sides of this argument have some merit, as our president likes to say about arguments between Nazis and non-Nazis, but, in the end, as always, I believe that Jim is wrong. Corporations will look for any excuse not to take a position on a controversy; that the freakin’ CEO of Walmart has openly dumped the white-working-class hero Republican president is a pretty strong indiciator, in my expert opinion, that Trump has really screwed up even by his own low standards. These CEOs, I believe, would absolutely, no doubt kill a drifter to get President Pence in office right now if that’s what it took.

That said, I’m not going to actually raise the meter until we see a Charlottesville-related drop in the polls. You never know—it could be Jim’s lucky day!

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.