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During the midst of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, president Trump called for a boycott of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. on August 19 because images from a purported diversity training session listed “Make America Great” and “Black Lives Matter” hats and shirts as unaccepted workplace attire.
That's nuts.
Dismissing the fact that a US president should be boosting rather than trashing American business, Trump is attacking the livelihood of Goodyear’s rank and file, which helped him win the Buckeye State in 2016.
The president is so full of himself and distracted by petty grievances that he cannot see how a boycott of Goodyear might backfire.
“The funny thing is, the people that work for Goodyear, I can guarantee you I poll very well with all of those great workers at Goodyear,” said Trump.
We’ll see about that.
Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, put it best. “It’s about MAGA and him. It has nothing to do with the 3,000 people that work there, the entire ripple effect throughout northeast Ohio, what Goodyear has meant to our community,” said Ryan.
Goodyear tried to set the record straight. It released a statement saying it neither distributed the visual nor was it part of a diversity class.
Restating its zero tolerance for harassment or discrimination, Goodyear does ask employees “to refrain from workplace expressions in support of political campaigning for any candidate or political party, as well as similar forms of advocacy that fall outside the scope of racial justice and equity issues.”
It was too late. The Trumpian damage was already done.
Boycotts are what Trump does best. They are easy attention-getters and Trump craves any attention that he can get. He’s called for boycotts against Apple, Macy’s, Univision, National Football League and Harley-Davidson.
Trump uses boycotts to divert attention from the various scandals plaguing his administration.
The Goodyear boycott call came the day after the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released its nearly 1,000-page report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election that found ample evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
What's the definition of collusion? It's when Trump's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort provides polling data to a Russian intelligence agent to allow Vladimir Putin to better target his online disinformation campaign on battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
And then there are the ghosts of more than 170K Americans killed from COVID-19 haunting the White House because the president failed to give the virus the attention that it deserved earlier this year.
Solving a global pandemic is hard work. Rolling out a boycott of Goodyear is a piece of cake.
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