In a letter, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities calls on President Donald Trump to resign if he does not see a problem with what’s happened this week. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images President’s arts and humanities committee resigns over Trump’s Charlottesville response

Another advisory group is walking away from President Donald Trump after his equivocation on neo-Nazis and white supremacists, with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigning en masse Friday morning.

“We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions,” members write in a joint letter to Trump obtained by POLITICO that ends by calling on the president to resign if he does not see a problem with what’s happened this week.


The first letter of each paragraph of the letter spells out "Resist."

The group works with American educators and leads cultural delegations to other countries. Members include artist Chuck Close, actor Kal Penn, author Jhumpa Lahiri and Vicki Kennedy.

Penn tweeted Friday that George C. Wolfe of the Public Theater in New York later added his name to the letter, meaning the full committee quit.

“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” the letter goes on.

As first lady, Melania Trump serves as the Committee's honorary chair.

Executives fleeing Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and Strategy & Policy Forum led the president to announce on Wednesday, after the fact, that he was ending them anyway. Thursday, he announced the disbanding of the Infrastructure council.

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At the end of the afternoon on Friday, the White House issued a statement insisting that it had planned to disband the arts and humanities committee anyway.

The statement said that "earlier this month it was decided" that Trump wouldn't renew the executive order that created the committee. But prior to Friday, no word of this was given to committee members, staff or any of the stakeholder agencies, according to people familiar with the internal processes. No evidence was provided that the White House timeline is accurate.

"While the committee has done good work in the past, in its current form it is simply not a responsible way to spend American dollars," the White House statement read.

The committee's Turnaround Arts program, which has since been moved to under the Kennedy Center, funds programs in nearly a hundred failing schools, many of them in red states, and many of which have generated more exponentially funding in other matching grants.

The White House claimed that the work "will continue" but gave no details of how that would happen.

Penn tweeted in response to the White House statement: "You can't break up with us after we broke up with you LMFAO."

Unlike the manufacturing and strategy advisory groups, the PCAH is an official agency. That makes this the first White House department to resign.

The PCAH letter details a case against Trump that goes deeper than other recent comments.

“You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding. The administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act and attacked our brave trans service members. You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country,” the members write. “This does not unify the nation we all love.”

Citing the contrast between America and Cuba, where the group recently led a delegation, the letter says that Trump is eating away at American values.

“Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed,” the letter states.

The 17-member committee was appointed by President Barack Obama and hasn't met under Trump, but it has continued work on some of its programs. Internal discussions throughout the week among its members led to the decision behind Friday's letter.

“Our job is to help protect those who teach America’s story through art and through a free press," said Eric Ortner, a talent manager, producer and manager who signed the letter. Ortner, a former chair of the White House Entertainment Advisory Committee, added: "I wanted to make sure that we were on the right side of American history."

