UPDATE: Presidential arts committee members resign over Trump’s Charlottesville comments
It’s not likely to hurt Trump as much as his idols leaving his advisory councils en masse, but the remaining members of the presidential arts and humanities committee are preparing to resign over the president’s response to neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville last week, The Washington Post reports. The committee was founded by former President Ronald Reagan, and had been made up of luminaries from Broadway, Hollywood, and the greater arts and entertainment community. According to the publication’s sources, the committee’s been working on its resignation letter all week, presumably adding pictures to help the White House staff understand the gravity of the situation.
The Post notes that most of the current members were holdovers from the Obama administration, including Kal Penn, so again, this isn’t likely to cause President “Let’s Cut Funding To The NEA And NEH” to lose sleep. It does leave First Lady Melania Trump, who serves as honorary chairwoman, without anyone to oversee or otherwise prevent her from commissioning graven images for the White House, though.
UPDATE: Kal Penn has posted the resignation letter to Twitter while addressing Trump directly on the platform. “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” the committee wrote.