By Alisha Dixon
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump added Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi as one of his administrations Strategic and Policy Forum members.
“My Administration is going to work together with the private sector to improve the business climate and make it attractive for firms to create new jobs across the United States from Silicon Valley to the heartland,” Trump said.
Nooyi said she was excited about being chosen and fully supports the President-elect.
“I’ll tell you, first of all, I want to congratulate President Donald Trump. Because the election is over, I think, we should mourn for those of us who supported the other side, but we have to come together and life has to go on,” said Nooyi.
“I’m sincerely hoping based on the talk we heard from our president-elect the day after the election, that what we’ve heard before the election and what we are seeing in action are quite different, and that it’s much more measured and it’s more sensitive to the trade deals that we have already and that we want to build this country the right way going forward not necessarily retreat into, you know, isolationism or whatever.”
Even with her excitement, the Pepsi exec has received criticism and questions from some of her employees.
“They were all in mourning. My employees were all crying. The question that they are asking, especially those who are not white — ‘Are we safe?’ Women are asking, ‘Are we safe?’ LGBT people are asking, ‘Are we safe?’ I never thought I would have to answer those questions,” she said. “So, I think that the first thing that we have to do is to assure everyone living in the United States will be safe. Nothing has changed because of this election. What we heard was election talk and we will all come together and unify as a country. So, the process of democracy happened. We just have to let life go on.”
Nooyi added, “A lot of what should have been said during the election I don’t think was said. Because I think we had the politics trump the issues, pardon the pun. I think that’s what happened. I think the real issues that face us as a country weren’t talked about, the reason being that if the real issues were put on the table we would have had to engage in a serious discussion. I don’t think we are ready for serious discussions. The real issues don’t lend themselves to [140] characters, the real issues don’t lend themselves to sound bites on television.”
This is all very confusing. Did she miss the almost daily Tweets posted by Trump?
As far as what she will focus on, she said,“we’ll have to pick up the big issues — technological unemployment, global trade, immigration, all of which needs reform and have serious conversation about that. Who is going to call for this dialogue, who will participate in the dialogue, and then what are we going to do about the dialogue are all big questions. I don’t know how we can handle it in a short bursts or soundbites. It would be counterproductive to do it in soundbites.”
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