Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."