That’s true even of Blackstone Group Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who has said some tone-deaf things about Nazis as recently as two days ago. But despite that, he and every other business leader on President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum decided to disband the council in response to Trump’s insistence that there were some “very fine people” at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville last week.
Now, it’s worth talking about Schwarzman, because he has been pretty emblematic of the corporate class’s love affair both with tax cuts and with Trump. Indeed, despite his 11-figure net worth, Schwarzman has been so concerned with minimizing his tax bill that, in 2010, he said President Barack Obama’s attempt to close the loophole that allows private equity executives such as himself to have their performance fees taxed at the capital gains rate of 23.