Steve Mnuchin’s Yale classmates are urging him to resign from the Trump administration in protest

Steve MnuchinMark Wilson/Getty Images

Members of treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin’s 1985 Yale class are urging him to resign from the Trump administration in protest.

The group cited President Donald Trump’s handling of the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, rally last weekend in an open letter to Mnuchin being circulated on Friday, Yale Daily News reported.

More than 290 alumni signed the letter to Mnuchin, which also criticized Trump’s wavering denunciations of the white nationalist groups that converged on the Virginia rally, where a counterprotester was killed and many others were injured on Saturday.

“We call upon you, as our friend, our classmate, and as a fellow American, to resign in protest of President Trump’s support of Nazism and white supremacy. We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing,” the letter to Mnuchin read.

Matthew Countryman, one of Mnuchin’s classmates who signed the letter, insisted the admonition had nothing to do with politics: “This is not a matter of the debt ceiling or the infrastructure project,” Countryman told CNN. “This is a question of what kind of democracy, what kind of nation will we be, and whose side is [Mnuchin] on?”

Mnuchin was a Goldman Sachs executive before he was confirmed as treasury secretary in February.