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The corporate cavalry isn’t coming.

Over the weekend, business leaders offered a mix of responses after federal agents shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, revealing yet again how one of America’s most powerful cohorts is — publicly, at least — carrying on with business as usual. Most executives said nothing. A few said a little. And a handful went ahead with a private VIP screening of the First Lady’s documentary at the White House.

The few who said a little included the heads of more than 60 Minnesota-based businesses who posted an open letter Sunday referring obliquely to “the recent challenges facing our state.” Without referring to Pretti or Renee Nicole Good by name, they said those challenges “have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life.” The businesses called for an “immediate deescalation of tensions.”

Outside of Minnesota, some of the most powerful executives on the planet aren’t just doing business as usual — they’re actively supporting the president, even as public opinion shifts firmly against the administration.

On Saturday, hours after federal agents killed Pretti, a group of CEOs opted to spend Saturday night at a private White House screening of the Amazon MGM Studios-produced “Melania” documentary about the first lady. They included, according to The Hollywood Reporter: Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, AMD’s Lisa Su, Zoom’s Eric Yuan, and the New York Stock Exchange’s Lynn Martin.

None of those executives responded to CNN’s request for comment Monday. The White House declined to comment.

First Lady Melania Trump posted a photo from the event on X Sunday, stating she was “deeply humbled to have been surrounded by an inspiring room of friends, family, and cultural iconoclasts” ahead of the film’s global release this Friday.

Of course, those “iconoclasts” seem to find themselves increasingly out of step with their customer base of the American buying public.

It’s not Cook’s or any other CEO’s job to solve all of America’s problems. They have a duty to make decisions based on the best interest of shareholders — and certainly, staying on Trump’s good side is one way to ensure business keeps running smoothly. Titans of industry have to do what they have to do. But putting on a tux and celebrating with an administration that is rapidly falling out of step with the global public — which their shareholders are members of — is different from staying silent.

Many CEOs use the principles of liberalism when it suits them and ignore them when it doesn’t. Just look at Tim Cook’s bio on X, where he quotes MLK as saying “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”

But we’ll come back to the quote later.

Trump is not nearly as popular as he was when he took office a year ago. But that’s not stopping many CEOs from continuing to publicly support, or at least tread lightly with, the president, even with his administration’s increasingly hostile behavior toward seemingly anyone who isn’t offering full-throated support of everything it does. That includes deploying ICE in Minnesota, attempting to take over Greenland, publicly insulting NATO allies at Davos, launching a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve chair and attempting to strong-arm American businesses into exploiting Venezuela’s oil assets.

CNN polling found that 51% of Americans believe the ICE agent who killed Renee Good acted inappropriately and reflected “bigger problems with the way ICE is operating.”

Deadly force against American civilians, as my colleague Aaron Blake notes, is hard for everyday folks to tune out. And as public outrage grows, it’s getting harder to make sense of Corporate America’s collective shrug.

“Why have ‘F-you’ money if you’re not going to speak up and use it?” asked author and former investment banker William D. Cohan on the Pivot podcast earlier this month, after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good.

“I’m sure they all have their very good reasons, on a micro basis, for why they’re doing it — ‘got to protect my customers, got to protect my employees,’” Cohan told me Monday. “They don’t want to be a nail that sticks up that this guy will beat down with his hammer.”

But a united front could, at the very least, isolate Trump, Cohan said. “Things like that have to be tried — it’s existential.”

And that’s what makes things like Cook’s MLK quote ring a little hollow. Especially because Martin Luther King, Jr., appears to have never actually said it.

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CEOs attended a private screening of ‘Melania’ on the day ICE killed Alex Pretti