Brand Trump Is Officially Dead

Tony Case
3 min readJan 7, 2021

Facebook, Shopify and Simon & Schuster among the companies and organizations ditching the Donald and his tribe in wake of failed coup

The thing about an attempted coup is, it tends to make people not want to do business with you.

Turns out President Donald Trump’s encouragement yesterday of a bunch of extras from “Duck Dynasty” (maybe a couple from “Braveheart”) to storm and ransack the U.S. Capitol didn’t exactly go as planned. Congress is pushing for impeachment (again), the 25th amendment is being talked about, cabinet members and White House staff are bolting, all the leading social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — have frozen Trump out, and numerous other companies and business organizations have suddenly distanced themselves from the would-be dictator and his enablers.

Let’s face it: Despite his relentless self promotion all these years, when it comes to actual business success, Brand Trump hasn’t exactly had the track record of a Procter & Gamble or Pepsico. Consider his recently imploded Atlantic City casino (only the latest of his multiple failures in that classy town), or his shuttered Trump University, or all the other stuff—wine, vodka, steaks, bottled water, menswear, an airline, a board game, a magazine, a mortgage company, a travel website, even a phone company — he’s slapped his name on. All out of business, every last one of them. And let’s not overlook the numerous buildings that used to have T R U M P emblazoned across them (because of licensing deals, not because he actually owned them) that have opted to yank his tainted name from their facades. (We won’t even get into Princess Ivanka’s serial failures as an attempted businesswoman — perhaps calling marauding gangs “patriots” in a since-deleted social media post may not be all that great for business either.)

And the bad news just keeps on coming for Brand Trump. Since the failed coup, Shopify has shut down two e-commerce shops peddling Trump merch, while the National Association of Manufacturers also turned its back on Trump, going so far as to call on Vice President Mike Pence to take his boss out. The Business Roundtable, a group of chief executives from some of the nation’s largest companies, called on the president to “put an end to the chaos and facilitate the peaceful transition of power,” as The New York Times reported. The heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Retail Federation have also damned Trump and his behavior. The bosses of companies like Coca-Cola, Chevron, Verizon, Ben & Jerry’s, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorganChase, Google’s parent Alphabet, PwC, PayPal, IBM and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. have all registered absolute disgust with what Trump incited in Washington, using terms like “shocking,” “disturbing,” “lawless,” “scary” and “one of the greatest assaults on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Meanwhile, staunch Trump ally and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley — whose stunt aimed at overturning the presidential election ended up fueling the coup attempt — has also seen his nascent brand turn to shit overnight, with Simon & Schuster pulling the plug on his forthcoming book. I believe the working title was “Sedition for Dummies.”

There may be a silver lining for Trump’s business fortunes, however. From the looks of things in D.C. yesterday, there remains a robust market for Trump-branded goods like caps, t-shirts, flags and muskets, so that’s something. Then there are all the juicy media possibilities. Clearly his devotees would tune in to Trump TV daily. And, what about a non-fake-news-paper, like The Trump Times? Or, The Daily Donald? Perhaps Jeff Zucker — a man with ample media experience, who gave Trump a weekly platform via NBC’s “The Apprentice” before destroying that network, before going on to destroy whatever’s left of CNN — could run the whole fetid enterprise?

Now to find someone to be the Walter Cronkite of Trump’s burgeoning communications empire. You know, someone with gravitas and mass appeal. And wearing a general’s uniform.

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Tony Case

Journalist. Misanthrope. Observer of media, marketing and the culture. Follow me!