I’ve been in the professional world for a long time, and I can honestly say that the ridiculousness I’ve seen since President Trump’s election is unprecedented. To be brutally frank, I’m ashamed, embarrassed and disgusted by the way many executives have behaved these past few months.

Back in November, I read many of the “letters to my team” that CEOs and corporate executives wrote in the wake of that month’s election. I was flabbergasted by the contempt displayed by these “leaders” for a large segment of their customers and employees. As I’ve commented many times on LinkedIn since then, this is not a winning strategy. Sadly, their subsequent behavior indicates that too many of our corporate leaders are bent on ignoring that lesson.

The post-mortem analysis of this election showed that the result pivoted on rural middle America, where a combination of former Democrat stalwarts voting Republican and other party loyalists staying away from the polls turned the seemingly reliable Blue states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin Red. Staunch Republican states became even more so because of this shift. The gains the Republicans made in statehouses and governorships are an even more telling result than the presidential polls here.

The cohort that drove this dynamic is whiter, more male, and more religious than the national average (though not exclusively so). The Clinton campaign and Democrats in general failed to court this demographic, though President Bill Clinton and Michigan Representative Debbie Dingell were two in the party who tried to get them to do so before disaster struck. More destructively still, the party has been increasingly contemptuous of these people for years, and has become even more so since the election, despite the clobbering they’ve taken from the voters for several election cycles now.

Dismayingly, big business displays a similar growing contempt for “flyover country” folks. In many of the aforementioned letters, the corporate executives made no effort to hide their naked disdain for Trump voters. The CEO of GrubHub famously ordered Trump backers at his company to tender their resignations, backpedaling later in the face of massive public anger. Less famously, the head of “inclusion” at General Mills saw fit to leave most Caucasian men out of his invitation to a support meeting for those traumatized by the election results (summarily dismissing most of the 31% of white males who were Hillary voters, while loftily and incorrectly assuming all women and minorities share his political views). Other letters were more balanced and neutral in their words, but the fact that no such missives were sent after the previous two presidential elections points to a corporate leadership contempt for half the U.S. population.

The childishness has not only continued since then, but has reached a crescendo since President Trump issued his immigration executive order. In reading the many letters corporate executives have felt compelled to issue on that topic, it becomes apparent that many of them either don’t understand it or purposely misrepresent it. Many more seem to believe that openness to people different from ourselves requires unregulated borders and a complete lack of policing of domestic security. These corporate titans seem to miss, or else believe that it’s good business to ignore, that the immigration constraint is supported by a majority of their customers and employees. These are our economic geniuses?

Even more appalling is the business community’s response to the hatred directed at President Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Somehow her business is now a legitimate target to many corporate executives, who’ve offered support for those wanting to destroy what she’s built simply because of she’s the child of a man they despise. This is unethical, stupid and infantile.

There are certainly businesses that can make lots of money selling only to urban, agnostic, liberal consumers. The big national brands can’t survive that way; witness the decline of the National Football League as a result of the anti-American protests they’ve allowed in their ranks. There’s been a similar decline in the fortunes of many businesses whose executives have hitched their companies to the bandwagon of progressive hatred. You’d think those “leaders” would have more important and positive things on which to spend their efforts.

It’s high time for these exorbitantly-compensated corporate executives to stop putting their personal politics first, and to focus on good business leadership instead. This means they should serve all their customers and all their employees, not just the ones who share their own political ideology. Either that, or they need to acknowledge their incompetence to lead a business because of their lack of personal control and judgment, and step aside – or perhaps be pushed aside by Board members looking for more responsible leadership. (At least Packetsled fired their CEO Matt Harrigan, who had threatened to shoot our then President-elect with a sniper rifle. It’s a start…)