Politics Ad Nauseam
Private biz in the Age of Trump
NEIGHTY- FOUR, PA O one in this rural southwestern Pennsylvania town cares much about the morality or politics of the ad that 84 Lumber Company aired during the Super Bowl.
They care mostly about what the company — named for the small town — does: the jobs it creates, how it contributes to the community, whether it has been a good neighbor to folks here and around the country.
In the ad, the building-materials retailer portrayed Spanish-speaking migrants making the arduous journey to the US border only to be met with an imposing wall. The end of the commercial shows two wooden doors in the wall through which a mother and daughter enter America.
It was hard to miss the point of the ad, though CEO Maggie Hardy Magerko — a Trump supporter who praised the proposed border wall — says it’s being misconstrued. Either way, the ad was clearly political in nature.
More concerning is the emerging witch hunt on the left that won’t allow companies to stay out of politics in the Age of Trump. Before his inauguration, Trump thanked Linda Bean, the granddaughter of L.L. Bean’s founder who sits on the board of the popular Maine clothing company, for her campaign support. That was enough to earn her a spot on a growing liberal black list.
The company put out a statement saying Linda’s personal politics were just that — personal. “But Shannon Coulter, one of the founders of [anti-Trump boycott organizer] Grab Your Wallet, told the Bangor, Maine, Daily News that the company would remain on the boycott list until Linda Bean is removed from the board,” CNN reported.
It was, even to some on the left, a head-scratcher. L.L. Bean, wrote Slate’s L.V. Anderson, “is one of the largest employers in Maine, even manufacturing several products there, and it takes a deeper interest in labor rights than most apparel companies. It has donated millions of dollars to conservationist and educational causes.”
Not good enough, apparently.
Then more recently there was ride-sharing company Uber.
After Trump signed an executive order heavily restricting immigration, especially from Muslim countries, protests broke out at JFK Airport, where refugees and greencard holders were left in limbo. City taxis called a work stoppage. Uber’s drivers, who can make individual choices and set their own hours, kept working.
That led to the #DeleteUber movement, a call to boycott the company for refusing to get in line. Then this month, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was pressured into resigning from Trump’s business-advisory council.
All major consumer brands in America are reassessing their government relations and communications strategies in this new world of spontaneous rage, according to Bruce Haynes, founding partner of Purple Strategies, a Washingtonbased consulting firm.
“Before Trump, most companies mostly worried about the threat of regulatory and policy issues cre- ating friction on the business,” he explained.
There’s another element to all this: Trump’s Twitter feed. The president has used policy debates on trade to single out companies like Carrier and General Motors, and used his Twitter feed to praise companies like L.L. Bean and Ford. And this week, he took the opposite tack: After word spread that Nordstrom was dropping Ivanka Trump’s fashion line due to flagging sales, Trump reprimanded the company on Twitter.
Businesses say they want a “Trump strategy” but it’s not that simple.
Everyone these days is a potential target, whether they’re a growing building-materials company, clothing retailer or an entertainer like Lady Gaga who decided that no politics — just pure entertainment mixed with a subtle nostalgia for Americana — was more appropriate for the Super Bowl halftime show.
“I’d rather see a focus by the media and a response by the general public away from these kinds of damaging outrages and more of how we generally address the problems facing the country,” said Elizabeth, a 30-something mother and working professional who lives here in Eighty-Four.
Why doesn’t she want to give her last name? “Do you see what they do to people, or companies, these days?” she explained. “I’d rather not have anyone knocking on my door or posting on my Facebook page when they read this.”