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In the first months of the Trump presidency, liberal boycotts seem to be having their desired effect of sending a powerful message to MAGA-friendly companies.
Target's latest earnings report suggests consumers who have boycotted the outlet over its abandonment of some diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have succeeded in hurting the company’s bottom line and conveying their dissatisfaction with Target’s cowing to the Trump administration.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Target CEO Brian Cornell said in an earnings call on Wednesday that the boycotts “played a role in our first-quarter performance,” which featured a steeper drop in quarterly sales (down 3.8%) than analysts expected. He said, however, that he couldn't estimate exactly how much a role the boycotts played.
Cornell also cited uncertainty around tariffs — which have been instituted as part of President Donald Trump’s destructive trade war — as having played a role in the earnings drop. Taken together, one way of reading this news is that Trump’s policies appear to have created all sorts of headwinds for one of the most prominent retailers in the United States.
The weak earnings report is likely to instill some confidence in consumers who’ve sought to use their purchasing power to make political statements and affect corporate policy-making. There had already been signs that Target was feeling the heat from the boycotts, such as its leadership’s meeting with civil rights activist and MSNBC host the Rev. Al Sharpton last month.
And liberals can also look to a steep earnings drop at Tesla in the first quarter of this year — which some have attributed to boycotts and growing international ire toward billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk — for yet another example of impactful activism. Musk has tried to do some damage control since Tesla's stock plunge, claiming his company is still on stable footing. Still, he was forced to acknowledge, in a recent CNBC interview, the reputational damage Tesla has suffered over the past few months amid the boycotts and other backlash — although he attributed this to "legacy media propaganda." Sounds like sour grapes to me.
To be clear: Target and Tesla are both massively wealthy companies. And the boycotts don't have their leadership in the poorhouse. But what they have succeeded in doing is forcing leadership of both companies to at least reckon with the impact their alignment with Trump and the MAGA movement has had on their bottom line.