In August, hundreds of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s former Yale University classmates wrote a letter calling on him to resign. Now, his high school classmates are joining in.
A group of 184 graduates of Riverdale Country School in New York City wrote a letter to Mnuchin, the New York Times reports, saying, “Like your classmates from Yale, we believe your resignation would be the most honorable choice.”
The letter specifically mentions Mnuchin’s refusal to denounce President Trump’s equivocal response to the violence in Charlottesville, where the President blamed both white supremacists and anti-racist counter-protesters equally for the violence that left a woman dead. “We all grew up in one of the most culturally and racially diverse cities in the world,” the letter says. “How is it that you have moved so far away from the values that we shared as students together?”
Mnuchin referenced his New York upbringing himself when he responded to a different controversy on Thursday, this one about a request to use government jets for his honeymoon and a report alleging that he and his wife had used one to go to Kentucky to view the solar eclipse. “You know, people in Kentucky took this stuff very serious,” he said. “Being a New Yorker and [living for a time in] California, I was like, the eclipse? Really? I don’t have any interest in watching the eclipse.”