Mass exodus: after Steve Bannon is fired, Carl Icahn and others resign from Donald Trump’s White House

| 5:31 pm EDT August 18, 2017
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Maybe they’re taking each other down like dominoes, or perhaps today’s tidal wave of departures are unrelated and they’re each merely a sign of the total chaos playing out. But in the hours since Donald Trump fired his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, multiple other key people have announced their own resignations from Trump’s White House. That list includes at least one name that will be widely recognized.

Just moments ago, billionaire investor Carl Icahn posted the following to his verified Twitter account: “Today, with President Trump’s blessing, I ceased to act as special advisor to the President on issues relating to regulatory reform” (link). Icahn has also posted a public letter to Trump in which he tries to retroactively establish that he never offered much advice to Trump one way or the other, presumably as an attempt at distancing himself from the entire Trump administration fiasco (link). But he’s far from the only Trump White House adviser to resign so far today.

Politico is reporting that George Sifakis, director of the Office of Public Liaison, has also announced his resignation this afternoon (link). Sifakis is an ally of Reince Priebus, who was forced out as Chief of Staff three weeks ago. Meanwhile The Hill is reporting that Department of Homeland Security CIO Richard Staropoli is resigning (link). And that still doesn’t complete the list of today’s departures.

This morning, before the Steve Bannon news broke, sixteen members of the Committee on the Arts & the Humanities all announced their resignation en masse (link). At the end of their group resignation letter, they said to this Donald Trump: “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”