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What do you buy the richest man in the world? The answer, obviously, is the one thing that usually can’t be had for love nor money, and that’s pimping out the presidential office for advertising purposes.
Posing with Elon Musk beside a scarlet Tesla parked on the White House driveway, Donald Trump announced that he was buying one of his friend’s cars despite not being allowed to drive for security reasons because: “I just want people to know that you can’t be penalised for being a patriot.” The billionaire currently chainsawing his way through so many ordinary federal workers’ jobs had, he said indignantly, been unfairly treated by people who inexplicably now seem to have turned against his cars.
Unedifying as all this was, what’s interesting is that it suggests that for once both men are rattled.
The once-reassuring idea that stock market jitters would be enough to rein Trump in is now fading fast: this week the president refused to rule out a recession, suggesting only that there would be “a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big”. But it seems he does still care either about his friends losing money, or perhaps about the idea gaining traction that joining Team Trump does the opposite of making you great again. Tesla’s share price has halved since December, with more than $800bn wiped off the company’s value thanks to sales in Europe nosediving. Musk’s social platform X has shed users fast in recent months, while the boss’s trade war seems to have cost his Starlink satellite business a $68m contract with the Canadian province of Ontario. This is not, to put it mildly, how oligarchy usually works. Asked on Fox Business this week how he managed to run his companies while slashing the state, an unusually downcast-looking Musk sighed “with great difficulty” before falling silent. It wasn’t exactly an advert for coming on board.
Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.
In Sweden, Facebook groups have sprung up urging boycotts of big US brands from Coca-Cola to Nike and Airbnb. Two-thirds of Germans would now rather avoid buying American where possible, according to a survey for the business newspaper Handelsblatt. In Denmark, amid widespread alarm over Trump’s threat to get Greenland “one way or another”, the country’s biggest grocery chain is reportedly tagging European-made products with a black star to help customers buy local, while Canadians have been furiously boycotting US brands ever since Trump first suggested he wanted to annex their country. Judging by a flurry of Reddit queries about what Canadian alternatives are available in the UK, meanwhile, some Brits may soon be starting to load up on maple syrup, McCain oven chips and extra strong Canadian bread flour (excellent for sourdough, apparently) in solidarity. While a translatlantic trade war is ultimately going to hurt smaller countries more than it hurts the US, it will not necessarily be pain-free for corporate America.
More significantly, European defence stocks have soared over the last week on the assumption that European governments seeking to rearm in a hurry will be reluctant to buy US-made weapons systems: if Washington is no longer a reliable ally, relying on US spare parts and software updates looks like a potential security weakness. Meanwhile shares in the Franco-British satellite network Eutelsat are up sixfold on rumours that European governments are looking for alternatives to Musk’s Starlink, and something of the same reverse Midas touch is now clearly blighting political as well as corporate brands associated with Trump. Pierre Poilievre, the rightwing populist who had been expected to demolish Canada’s Liberal party in this year’s elections, has seen his poll lead evaporate. And in Britain, being tipped as a future Reform UK party leader by Musk seems, if anything, to have helped end Rupert Lowe’s career. (Didn’t he know there is only ever room for one star in a Nigel Farage party?)
It’s too early to tell, of course, whether Trump’s attempt to drum up business on his friend’s behalf will bring the Maga faithful flocking to the rescue of a beleaguered brand. But if they do decide en masse to trade their trucks in for Teslas, at least we can all enjoy the irony of the people otherwise most furiously resistant to electric cars being suckered into accidentally cutting their carbon emissions by a president who doesn’t appear to believe in the climate crisis. These days, you take your pleasures where you can.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
