The following article by James Hohman with Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website February 3, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: Companies are caught between a rock and a hard place, with President Trump on one side and their customers on the other.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick quit President Trump’s 15-member council of business leaders yesterday, and Disney CEO Bob Iger let it be known that he won’t attend a meeting at the White House today because of a scheduling conflict.
Nordstrom announced last night that it will stop selling Ivanka Trump’s name-branded line of clothing and shoes after an extended boycott by an anti-Trump activist group called “Grab Your Wallet.“
The retailer said the first daughter’s products are being dropped because of poor sales. In early December, Nordstrom had 71 Ivanka items for sale on its web site. Right now, just four are left. And they’re all being sold at a clearance discount.
We’ve obviously written a lot about companies bending to pressure from Trump, especially defense contractors like United Technologies, Boeing and Lockheed. But firms that depend on retail sales will perhaps care more about pressure from their customers than from White House heavies.
Customers complained so loudly after Kawasaki USA – a distributor of motorcycle, ATVs and personal watercraft – sponsored an episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice” that the company said it will not sponsor the show again, so long as the president is credited as an executive producer.
The “Grab Your Wallet” campaign has targeted more than 60 companies, including Trump’s golf courses and hotels, those that sell Trump-branded goods and other businesses whose leaders endorsed Trump or donated to his campaign. “The people who voted against Donald Trump may have lost at the ballot box, but they can win at the cash register,” Shannon Coulter, who helps lead the effort, told David Fahrenthold and Sarah Halzack.
“Grab Your Wallet” has taken five companies off its boycott list since November, after they stopped selling Ivanka merchandise: Shoes.com, Bellacor, Wayfair, Zulily and RueLaLa.
Another retailer that distanced itself from Trump is L.L. Bean. The maker of outdoor apparel and footwear became a boycott target last month after news reports that heiress Linda Bean gave $55,000 more than legally allowed to a PAC set up to help the president win Maine. In response, Trump urged his Twitter followers to shop there. That prompted the executive chairman of the company to put out a statement distancing L.L. Bean from Mrs. Bean and insisting that the business was totally apolitical. “We fully acknowledge and respect that some may disagree with the political views of a single member of our 10-person board of directors,” Shawn Gorman wrote.
— Grassroots pressure has proven effective at several other moments since Trump became president two weeks ago today. The two Republican senators who came out against Betsy DeVos, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, cited constituent phone calls as a key factor in their decision. The administration watered down (aka “clarified”) its refugee ban to exempt green-card holders after the massive protests at airports.
— The pressure to take an anti-Trump stand is especially acute in the left-leaning technology world. After attempting to reach out to Trump by attending a meeting with him in New York, CEOs are girding for a high-stakes confrontation with the sitting president. “Silicon Valley is littered with immigrant success stories: Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, is an immigrant from India; Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a refugee from the former Soviet Union; and Omid Kordestani, Twitter’s executive chairman, was born in Iran. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, leading Cook to say, in a letter denouncing Trump’s travel ban, that the company ‘wouldn’t exist’ if such a ban had been in place,” Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report from San Francisco. Five nuggets from their story:
- A little more than half of U.S. start-ups that are estimated to be worth more than $1 billion were founded by immigrants, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, an Arlington think tank.
- In a new open letter, more than 115 Silicon Valley start-up founders and venture capitalists plead with the administration to cancel the immigration ban.
- Another letter from executives at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and others is also being drafted.
- Amazon and Expedia have joined a lawsuit brought by the state of Washington against the immigration ban.
- Some tech companies are now considering whether to move jobs out of the United States to places with more relaxed immigration policies, such as Vancouver and Dublin.
— Uber was particularly susceptible to a customer boycott because it is most popular in urban areas, where Democrats are strongest. Kalanick, the CEO, claimed yesterday that he made his decision to drop out of Trump’s business council after hearing the stories of Uber drivers, specifically refugees from Egypt and Vietnam. But it probably had more to do with 200,000-plus customers deleting their accounts in response to a campaign called #deleteUber.
Lyft rode a wave of frustration with its arch-rival to become the most downloaded program on Apple’s AppStore over the past few days. Lyft announced that it will also no longer allow ads for its service to run on Breitbart, formerly run by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and announced it will donate $1 million to the ACLU, which is fighting the Trump refugee ban in court.
Earlier in the week Uber said it would put up $3 million to help its drivers with immigration legal costs, but that did almost nothing to squelch the blowback. “The implicit assumption that Uber (or I) was somehow endorsing the Administration’s agenda has created a perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are,” Kalanick said yesterday.
The ride-sharing service has faced multiple protests in front of its San Francisco headquarters:
An employee revolt from within Uber was another major factor driving Kalanick’s decision. The CEO faced an onslaught of questions from upset staff earlier this week. “According to nearly a dozen current and former Uber engineers and product managers who attended or were briefed on the Tuesday all-hands meeting, employees said they were concerned that Mr. Kalanick’s willingness to work with Mr. Trump after the immigration order would color Uber as a soulless company that cared only about its bottom line,” Mike Isaac reports on the front page of today’s New York Times. “Some told Mr. Kalanick that they had suffered a personal cost — a stigma, they said — of working at Uber. One staff member asked him to present the benefits of working at Uber that could outweigh that personal cost. … Outside of the internal pressure, Uber faced other fallout from Mr. Kalanick’s stance.”
— After Uber’s CEO pulled out, other members of Trump’s business council said they’ll keep their commitments to attend today’s meeting. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a statement that he’s going to express his objections to the recent executive order on immigration “and offer suggestions for changes to the policy.”
The CEO of the Cleveland Clinic promised to object to the travel ban directly to Trump’s face. A Sudanese citizen who is a first-year resident in one of his hospitals is stuck in Sudan and unable to return, for example. “He has an opportunity to talk directly to the president, and that is a good opportunity,” Toby Cosgrove’s spokeswoman told the AP’s Julie Bykowicz. (The meeting in the State Dining Room will be closed press, except for a photo spray at the top.)
— And the Trump team is making an effort to entice and reward companies for cooperating. Last night, Ivanka invited several business leaders over to her new house in Kalorama for a dinner party. Attendees included: Walmart CEO Doug McMillon; General Motors CEO Mary Barra; Ernst & Young CEO Mark Weinberger; Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky; and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Politico reports that the stated purpose was to solicit ideas on how to promote women in the workforce and fight for issues like paid maternity leave.
“On Monday afternoon, a second-shift worker at Harley-Davidson’s powertrain factory … learned that Trump was slated to visit … Feeling sick to his stomach, he wrote a private Facebook message to a local protest group,” Danielle reports. “The demonstrators … contacted Harley-Davidson through Facebook, telling the company that they would gather outside the factory to protest the president’s immigration policies. The group organized a call-in campaign, urging activists to flood Harley-Davison and chief executive Matt Levatich with messages, emails and phone calls condemning Trump’s appearance.”— The saga surrounding the president’s decision not to visit the Harley-Davidson plant in Wisconsin yesterday offers another case study of how pressure from customers and employees may change corporate behavior in the Trump era. Danielle Paquette has a great read about how the motorcycle manufacturer, the Secret Service and administration officials were actively preparing for the president to travel Thursday afternoon until liberals in the Milwaukee area began to organize what might have become a massive protest. The trip got called off, and Harley executives came to see Trump at the White House yesterday instead. (Sean Spicer claims that the trip plan was never finalized, but there are a lot of details that cast doubt upon the credibility of his denial.)
— To be sure, boycotting anyone who has anything to do with Trump diminishes in effectiveness at some point. The anti-Trump resistance movement risks overplaying its hand, galvanizing recalcitrant Republicans to reluctantly rally behind the new leader of their party. Trump would love nothing more than to resurrect the Nixon-era trope that he speaks for a “silent majority” amidst protests and disorder. When liberals look unreasonable and unhinged, they unwittingly play into his hands like silly putty. The idea that people shouldn’t even speak to the president of the United States if he asks for their advice on something, as if that automatically compromises them, surely seems silly to most Americans. Imagine how outraged some of the progressives involved in the anti-Trump boycotts would have been if conservatives had refused to talk with Barack Obama when he asked for a meeting.
Consider the example of Taylor Gourmet, a popular D.C. sandwich chain. Co-founder Casey Patten received an invitation to attend a Monday ceremony on small business at the White House. He’d gone twice to the Obama White House for similar events. He spent the weekend writing out talking points, including that more than half of his 300-plus employees are immigrants or the children of immigrants. At the meeting, he says he told Trump that his immigrant employees are “nervous.”
After he appeared at the meeting, food bloggers and liberal activists began attacking him online. Patten wound up visiting all of his stories this week to calm his frustrated employees. He even started crying in his car as he drove between locations. Distraught, he decided to call The Post’s Tim Carman to tell his side of the story. “My political views don’t lean to one side or another,” he said.
But attacks, which some might say bordered on harassment, continued:
Jose Andres, who nixed plans to open a restaurant in Trump’s D.C. hotel and has been enmeshed in protracted litigation with the billionaire since then, came to Taylor Gourmet’s defense:
Notably, one woman replied on Twitter that she’d now boycott Andres’s restaurants as well! To which the legendary chef replied:
— Trump supporters, to a much lesser degree, are also boycotting companies that are not supportive of the president’s agenda. Howard Schultz, chief executive of the Starbucks coffee chain, responded to the president’s immigration order by announcing plans to hire thousands of refugees in dozens of countries around the world over the next five years. That led to a #BoycottStarbucks campaign. As our Cleve Wootson quipped, “Critics erupted with a Trenta-size helping of vitriol.”
— Even big media companies are now responding to pressure from the left: The New Yorker just canceled the posh party that it holds at the W Hotel before the White House Correspondents Dinner, and Vanity Fair is pulling out of co-sponsoring the dinner’s most exclusive after-party (at the French ambassador’s residence). Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, told the New York Times that he will spend the weekend fishing in Connecticut instead. And comedian Samantha Bee plans to hold an alternative event on the night of the April 29 dinner.
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