When white supremacist David Duke is about your only vocal public supporter, Mr. President, you have a big problem.

Business leaders on Wednesday fled en masse from a pair of White House advisory boards, forcing President Donald Trump to pull the plug on the boards before every member was gone.

The loss of support from corporate America is big setback for a pro-business president who was a businessman himself and who based his campaign on helping Main Street and Wall Street.

Also read:Trump business councils disband amid wave of CEO exits

The mass CEO resignations followed widespread denunciations by Democrats and Republicans after the president’s disastrous press conference on Tuesday in which he said some far-right demonstrators in Charlottesville were “very fine people.”

The controversial remarks were a final straw for business leaders who accepted advisory roles to Trump in the hopes they could influence his decisions on taxes, regulations and the economy.

“Such racism and bigotry must not just be condemned, but must be condemned unequivocally,” Blackrock CEO Larry Finn wrote to employees after resigning from one of the White House boards.

The president was even indirectly rebuked by military leaders on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who posted messages on their Twitter accounts castigating far-right extremists who gathered at the University of Virginia over the weekend. The violent protests lead to the death of one woman and scores of injuries.

In just one stroke, the president lost the support of two traditional constituencies of the Republican party: big business and the military brass.

Many business leaders only reluctantly joined Trump’s advisory board, apparently hoping he would behave better as president than he did on the presidential campaign.

They found out otherwise, especially after breaking with the president. Merck CEO Ken Frazier, for example, was excoriated by Trump in a pair of tweets after he resigned Monday from an advisory board.

When other executives began to follow suit, Trump called them “grandstanders” and bragged that “I have many to take their place.”

Evidently not. The president ended the advisory councils before he could suffer further embarrassment.

While executives are sure to continue to push for tax reform and other measures they view as helpful to their companies and the economy, few, if any, will dare risk tying themselves to Trump again. They are more likely to work through Congress even though it’s a slower path to achieve their goals.

Isolated more than ever in Washington, the president has shown a tendency to retaliate against opponents. Yet an effort to hurt the businesses of CEOs who abandoned him would only further undermine Trump’s presidency by derailing his pro-business agenda.

David Duke can create a lot of trouble, but he can’t create jobs.