I’m all for consumer boycotts. In our spend-it-while-you-can society, a boycott is sometimes the best way to make a statement about capitalist enterprises that enable one kind of injustice or another.
Sometimes boycotts work, often they don’t and many times they are just silly. The MAGA crowd’s current call for a boycott of Costco, the Issaquah-headquartered wholesale giant, falls into the third category.
Costco is now the largest of many companies suing the Trump administration to retrieve tariff fees paid since the president declared an impulsive and erratic trade war on the rest of the world. Costco is anticipating a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that many expect to declare Trump’s biggest tariffs illegal and unconstitutional because they bypassed Congress through misapplication of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
In a different era, conservatives would have cheered for any private company that tried to claw back unfair tax payments from the federal government, but the MAGA movement is not really conservative, in the traditional sense. MAGA is, at its heart, a cult of personality. Thus, any attack on the cult leader is an attack on all.
There is certainly a bit of economic ignorance involved. MAGA folks willingly believe Trump’s contention that extreme tariffs will boost the American economy and bring back jobs in industry, all paid for by foreign countries. That is an easily disprovable thesis, but, among Trump’s supporters, facts and statistics do not matter, faith does — their faith in Trump.
That means Costco must be shunned and punished at great sacrifice to MAGA shoppers who will have to prep for Armageddon at some other store where they can buy their toilet paper and Coors Light in bulk.
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