While former President Donald Trump’s positions generally align with his supporters, a rare chasm opened up in the wake of his recent remarks about an embattled beer brand.
Bud Light sparked widespread and ongoing boycotts last year after teaming up with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, and sales have yet to recover.
For his part, Trump appears to believe that the time has come for Americans upset by the marketing ploy to return to a brand that had once appealed to a broad swath of conservative beer drinkers.
Trump comments on the Bud Light boycott: "Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance? What do you think? Perhaps, instead, we should be going after those companies that are looking to DESTROY AMERICA!" pic.twitter.com/mRfTnnjTJW
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 6, 2024
In a social media post, he acknowledged that the company made a “mistake of epic proportions,” but cited its investment in the farming industry and the military veterans it employs as reasons to give the brand a “second chance.”
Noting that Bud Light and its parent company paid “a very big price” for its collaboration with Mulvaney, he added: “Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company, but I can give you plenty that are. Am building a list, and might just release it for the world to see.”
A number of prominent pundits pushed back against his statement, including National Review writer Noah Rothman, who argued that Trump and Anheuser-Busch “need one another” to increase revenue for both the company and the Republican National Committee. An Anheuser-Busch lobbyist is reportedly hosting a fundraiser next month to benefit Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
“Their mutual admiration is set to cool the tensions between Bud Light and the customers the brand communicated in no uncertain terms it did not want,” Rothman added.
Writer B.L. Hahn wrote in The Federalist that Bud Light has not done enough to warrant an end to the boycott.
If Anheuser-Busch wants this boycott to end, the solution is rather simple: Issue a public statement acknowledging that men cannot become women,” Hahn wrote. “The fact that any company would hesitate to do this in the first place proves that corporate leftism threatens even the most basic truths. This is not the time to surrender — and Trump needs to understand that more than anyone.”
Of course, Trump’s eldest son extended an olive branch to the company much earlier than his father, sharing a statement in April that similarly drew backlash from the right.
“I’m not for destroying an American, an iconic company, for something like this,” the younger Trump said at the time. “The company itself doesn’t participate in the same leftist nonsense as the other big conglomerates.”
