Businesses brace for presidential Twitter ire

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, April 4, 2018

WASHINGTON — Amazon, you’re not alone.

President Donald Trump once accused Verizon of making “a STUPID deal” for AOL. He ridiculed Coca-Cola as “garbage” — but said he would keep drinking it. He called both H&R Block and Nordstrom “terrible.” He said Sony had “really stupid leadership” and described executives at S&P Global, a financial firm, as “losers.”

Before and after he became president, Trump attacked businesses, sports leagues, Wall Street giants — and many media companies

Lately, Trump’s anti-business rants have become particularly menacing and caused the stocks of some companies to plunge.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long a booster of Republican presidents, is not happy. “It’s inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company,” said Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer of the chamber.

Amazon’s stock price dropped sharply before rebounding this week after Trump threatened the company with possible antitrust action. The president’s remark in November that the merger of AT&T and Time Warner would not be “good for the country” roiled the continuing antitrust fight between the companies and the government.

Most presidents have clashed with business interests and industries, sometimes in ways that generated headlines. But Trump is unique in singling out individual companies for ridicule with regularity. And rarely have presidents done so because of a personal pique or grudge, as happens with Trump.

“This is an unprecedented situation for companies. The president’s tweets can cause significant reputational harm,” said Dean C. Garfield, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents big technology companies like Amazon, Dell, Facebook, Google and IBM. “We are now at a place where about 90 percent of the companies we represent now have a presidential Twitter strategy in place.”

For many companies, that strategy comes down to waiting out the storm. In recent days, Amazon has all but ignored the president’s taunts, which he issued in a flurry of tweets.

Trump’s most ardent supporters say they appreciate his willingness to criticize the corporate establishment.

“He continues to go directly after the companies and not care about political correctness,” said Terry Bowman, a former Trump campaign organizer who works at a Ford Motor parts factory in Michigan.

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