By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Donald Trump has managed to behave so badly that a handful of CEOs have had to drop out of the president’s Business Council to preserve some semblance of dignity.

One or two did drop out of some council or other to protest the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement, but it was nothing like the outright fleeing that happened last week.

Turns out that Trump’s failure to condemn the white supremacists and the death of a counter-protestor in Charlottesville, Virginia, is bad for business.

I have no illusions that the cold souls of company executives were moved by anything approaching ethics, this is entirely about keeping their customers away from revenge-boycotting their products.

Which is why I have to give it up to Donald Trump: Imagine how evil a person has to be for even Big Pharmaceuticals to want to escape the pong of their reputation.

It has been a distressing few years watching the rise of white supremacy and neo-nazism all over the world, but I honestly thought things would abate after the Obama “dream years.”

Because look, right? The most universally admired president of the United States of the century and he was African and American.

Instead, the US decided to reward itself by electing a man who has confused and exasperated any notion of moral rectitude.

It is darkly funny — pun intended— that so many of his electorate have decided to draw the line at his racist comments.

The threat of nuclear war, climate-led annihilation of civilisation and any number of poorly thought-out decisions couldn’t do what a series of botched “condolences” achieved.

As much as I resent living in a world where everything and anything can be recorded at anytime and anywhere, the one gift this perpetual documentation has given us is proof.

Footage of what the American police system is up to with regards to people of colour, especially African Americans, is an education in and of itself.

Couple this with footage of neo-nazi protesters chanting the most hateful and one thing becomes clear: the US is in the grip of a tribal war as poisonous and intractable as anything that could be cooked up in the more traditional political armpits of the world.

Let me contrast this with a situation closer to home. I found it instructive that while Charlottesville was brewing, the Kenyan elections were being reported with a particular lens by the Western press.

The theme was “a nation divided” and much of the international press could not contain its ghoulish glee at the thought of Africans killing each other.

Once the script has been written, I guess, we are not supposed to deviate from it, nor learn from the mistakes of the past?

Well, for all that Kenya was short-sightedly cast as one hot tribal mess, her youthful generation has been signalling for the past few years that political violence might not be their cup of tea.

And indeed, 2017 so far has been radically and deliberately different from the 2007 experience.

Meanwhile, in America, citizens are clumping into Klans and driving into crowds and murdering each other routinely over colour.

This is not a young democracy we’re talking about here. So it tickles me to think that Kenya might have a few wisdoms and insights to impart to grand old US.

It looks as though the one has a facility with learning from its past that the other could stand to gain.

An obvious tactic, for example, is to keep your flaming racists locked in the attic with all your other intractable problems rather than trying to elect them into office. Come to think of it, South Africa should probably sit in on some of those lessons too.

Anyway, back to these American CEOs who are trying to act like they weren’t totally dating Trump a few seconds ago: They are a good litmus test.

In America, the customer’s dollar is king. Business is signalling that it cannot be associated with a president who doesn’t understand that while his diehard political base might be made up of stir-crazy people, his economic base is most assuredly not.

Will this faux-pas be the vehicle of Trump’s demise? Hard to say. But can we finally just admit, in the name of Midas, that there is no way this economically incompetent man wrote The Art of the Deal let alone read it.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]