The Price of Staying on Trump’s Good Side
A classic trick in the Trump playbook: take credit for a company’s sale or investment that was already in the works.
GREAT NEWS! THERE’S A BRAND-NEW marketing hack, courtesy of our salesman-in-chief. If you need free advertising, just claim you have a terrific deal, and say Donald Trump convinced you to do it. He won’t be able to resist hawking your wares.
Earlier this week Walmart found itself enlisted in such a marketing campaign, when President Trump posted that at his administration’s “request to celebrate our great Country’s 250th birthday” the company would be “dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products.”
This is a huge deal for the many millions of Americans who, smartly, shop at Walmart, which is a truly patriotic Company who loves the U.S.A.
There are a few things worth noting about this.
First, if you’ve ever shopped at Walmart—or really any major superstore—you know they have sales and promotions all the time. Especially around midsummer. In fact, consumer analysts sometimes refer to the doldrums of July as “promotion week,” as retailers offer deep discounts to lure errant, sunshine-soaking shoppers back indoors.
In Walmart’s case, a spokesperson told me that the retailer began one of its regular price “Rollback” events early last week—i.e., the week before Trump blasted out his claim that price cuts were imminent and would be happening at his request.1
The backstory, according to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, is that a USDA official had a phone call with Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons in the days before July Fourth to discuss beef prices.2 During that call, per the Journal, Walmart said that it “already had plans to reduce prices on many items for the summer, including beef.”
USDA, which has been arguing for months that beef prices have been artificially inflated, relayed that information to Trump, who seems to have misunderstood the timing, blasted out the news, and claimed credit for the price cuts.
When contacted for comment, Walmart referred me to a statement it had released minutes after that Trump post on Monday. The statement read like pretty much every other superstore press release, promoting price cuts at Walmart and Sam’s Club for select summer cookout staples like hot dogs and a store-brand ice cream.
The statement did not mention Trump, and a Walmart spokesperson declined comment on the record further.
In a normal democracy—one with, say, free markets and the rule of law—a major retailer should have no issue publicly confirming that it made pricing decisions for business reasons only, and not under any sort of political pressure. Firms should be able to say that they are prioritizing shareholder interests (as they are legally required to do) rather than the president’s ego. But we do not live in that kind of democracy at the moment. We live in Donald Trump’s America, where corporations might reasonably fear retribution if they contradict his preferred message—or worse, embarrass him.
After all, last year, when Walmart executives merely acknowledged the obvious fact that higher tariffs would feed into higher prices, Trump fired a warning shot at the retailer.
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” he posted on Truth Social. And then, echoing the greedflationists among the populist left, he complained about how much money the company was making: “Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
If you believe in quaint notions like the rule of law, and if you think companies ought to be able to lower prices without looping in the president, you’d fit right in here. Consider signing up for a Bulwark+ membership and joining our growing pro-democracy community.
Trump’s Everyday Low Vices
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME that Trump has amplified, and claimed credit for, a company’s promotions, with or without its consent. In fact it’s not even the first time he did it with Walmart.
Last Thanksgiving, he claimed credit for what Walmart touted as its “best offer yet.” At multiple rallies he cheered that “Thanksgiving this year will cost 25 percent less than Thanksgiving last year under Sleepy Joe Biden.”
In that case, Walmart’s Thanksgiving bundle had indeed gotten cheaper—because the bundle included different brands and fewer food products than the previous year’s deal. So not quite apples to apples (or turkeys to turkeys, or whatever). But who cares about pesky methodological considerations, given the potential for mutually beneficial free advertising?
That same month, the White House also blasted out DoorDash’s “State of Local Commerce” report as evidence “that inflation has been tamed.” Inflation had very much not been tamed, of course, according to official government measures like the consumer price index. Even the firing of the top civil servant at the agency that produces the CPI could not hide this problem.
Apparently, the White House had hunted for alternative measures to cherry-pick. It found the DoorDash report, which bragged that breakfast foods ordered on the delivery app had (just fortuitously) recently become a terrific deal.
Trump has since also tried to slap his brand on other corporate promotions, including by taking credit for the return of Extra Value Meals at McDonald’s. He has promoted a bunch of “deals” he made on prescription drugs, through both the TrumpRx platform and “most favored nation” agreements on drug pricing. But it’s not clear how much the public is actually benefiting from those developments, given that White House agreements with pharma companies are opaque and unenforceable and appear to cover only a tiny fraction of popular drugs.
More recently, there’s the sketchy Trump-endorsed “Freedom Fuel Network,” a selection of gas stations across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They appear to be selling gasoline at an unsustainable discount, charging prices far lower than other gas stations and well below cost. The ownership of these Potemkin stations remains unknown; as does the identity of whoever may be subsidizing them and to what end. The White House says it’s not directly involved, and the attorney listed on the Freedom Fuel Network’s trademark application (filed July 1) did not respond to a request for comment.
But there are certainly other deep-pocketed companies and individuals who have used private funds to subsidize Trump’s government initiatives, sometimes with suspect motives. And Trump has often tried to bend market pricing to his whims, too, with or without favor-trading.
It’s not just about prices
MOST OF THE TIME, though, Trump is the proverbial rooster taking credit for the sunrise. He looks for opportunities to slap his name on politically useful things that companies were already planning to do—seasonal sales, major investments, hiring, et very much cetera.
There’s the aluminum plant getting built in Alabama that the Trump White House tried to steal credit for—even though construction began in 2022, when Joe Biden was still president. If anything, Trump’s aluminum tariffs have jeopardized the future of that factory, according to the president’s own allies. There are similar examples across other industries.3
Not every company has the means to make a big, spendy splash to suck up to the president. I don’t know why more companies don’t get in on the sale grift, though. Just ping the White House every time you already have a promo going on. You’re already stuck in Donald Trump’s America; why not get the free advertising?
Next time Jeff Bezos talks to Trump, he should promise to institute Prime Day (or better yet, “PRIME DAY” in all caps) in the president’s honor. Heck, every bar in America should commit to slash prices at happy hour to celebrate how happy they are that Sleepy Joe is gone. It’s clear our president wants to control prices; maybe our best option is to pretend he already does.
Ramparts
— The real corporate hero we need, as I’ve said many times before, is Costco. The company has been unafraid to buck Trump (on both economic and culture-war issues). It also delivers low prices and pays its workers well. At one point Democrats recognized this, when former President Barack Obama cheered the warehouse club’s high pay and low employee turnover. These days Democrats are more likely to namecheck Costco as being among the “giant grocery stores and massive food conglomerates” responsible for high grocery prices and “ripping people off.” (When you’re blaming Costco for high prices, you’ve lost the plot.)
— Another way companies have been currying favor with the Trump administration involves giving their products a MAHA makeover. Mars Inc. is launching a new line of M&M’s, without the blue ones, because it told the administration it would use all-natural dyes and a natural blue food coloring is uneconomical at scale.4 Walmart has also committed to remove artificial dyes from its private-label food products. Of course if the Trump administration were actually committed to removing toxins from foodstuffs, it probably wouldn’t do things like this.
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed this week that the administration has abandoned plans to put Harriett Tubman on the $20 bill. Those plans had been in the works for a decade.
— The U.S. brain drain continues: Chemist Omar Yaghi, who had been a professor at UC Berkeley when he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year, has departed the United States for a job at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He will lead a new AI materials lab. In a recent interview with Scientific American, he decried declining financial support for scientific research: “The current state is not so encouraging because of the cutting back on grants and support of science by the very agencies that many university researchers rely on.”
— Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) introduced legislation to punish Canada because some Canadian provinces have blocked sales of U.S.-produced spirits. If only she could figure out who started this here trade war. . .
Additionally, in the company’s earnings call back in May, a Walmart executive talked about plans for more seasonal price cuts: “We’re continuing to lean into rollbacks in seasonal value programs to reinforce our price leadership, and we’re seeing a strong response from customers through increased unit volumes. We have approximately 7,200 rollbacks across our assortment, which is up more than 20% versus last year.”
Beef prices are at record highs for a number of reasons, including drought, screwworm, tariffs, and other factors leading to herd sizes shrinking to 75-year lows.
This new version will also exclude brown M&M’s because, it turns out, the candy’s brown coloring includes the blue dye—which raises a crucial question: If the new M&M’s are going to be only red, orange, yellow, and green, how easily will they be confused for Skittles?
Costco is an amazing company. Thanks Catherine for saying it like it is.
Unfortunately, many of Trump's supporters are not familiar with retailing tactics