MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Warns Companies ‘Giving Gold Statues To Trump’ Should Expect To Pay The Price
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told fellow host and former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, that companies that reward or capitulate to President Donald Trump — give him “gold statues” — can expect economic pain from “the American people.”
Psaki interviewed Maddow on Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki, in advance of her new documentary, Andrew Young: The Dirty Work.
The discussion of the civil rights icon led to the topic of the “No Kings” protests against Trump and the use of boycotts and other economic pressure:
PSAKI: I mean, there are calls for boycotts all the time. We’ve seen this long before Trump entered the scene about a variety of things. How do you look at the power of economic boycotts and which ones, maybe we can learn from history, maybe we can learn from other countries, are effective and people should participate in? How do people decide?
MADDOW: I mean, certainly there are organized boycotts, and we’ve seen that, for example, around corporations repealing their DEI policies and stuff. There’s been some organized boycotts along those lines this year since Trump has been pressuring corporations to do that.
But I think that we should think about economic power more broadly. I mean, you look at the Kimmel fiasco, right? Like the Brendan Carr and the Trump administration eventually proclaimed they had not done all the things that they had done to try to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air for being a Trump critic.
But that was only after the institutions, the public facing and for-profit institutions they were trying to act through were pressured by the American people into changing their minds. So when ABC and Disney and Nexstar and Sinclair hear from their own customers and hear from the American people about what they’re doing, those organizations, even right wing organizations like Sinclair, organizations like that are very sensitive to public feedback and to consumer feedback.
And even though, you know, Donald Trump and Tom Homan and Stephen Miller may not be sensitive to criticism, all the institutions that they’re trying to work through to get the kind of authoritarian transformation that they want in this country, a lot of those institutions are public facing and are very sensitive.
And so that kind of economic pressure can really, really make a difference. And every — every company that thinks about, you know, giving Trump a gold statue or taking down ICEBlock style apps out of their App Store or any of these other things that the tech companies and these other corporations are doing. Any company wants to do stuff like that should know that they’re going to hear from the American people about it.
And I think those repercussions will continue and escalate as Trump gets more and more unpopular, as he gets more and more radical.
PSAKI: And we’re going to continue to talk about it relentlessly, too, for what it’s worth,
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki.
