As you may have noticed, celebrations of “pride” have been much more subdued this Pride Month than they were in recent memory. The parades this year are less conspicuous and bombastic. Corporate websites are less obnoxious and explicit. And perhaps most notably, triumphant in-store displays have disappeared almost entirely or, at the very least, are much smaller and more restrained than in past years.
According to some in the mainstream media, all of this moderation—or abandonment—of LGBT “pride” has the same root cause as all evils in contemporary America: Donald Trump. The president is so mean, so nasty, and so omnipotent that companies fear him and do whatever they can to avoid incurring his wrath, including, apparently, forsaking longstanding practices, affiliations, and beliefs:
Corporate America has fallen out of love with Pride Month—and it’s because of Donald Trump.
Businesses that used to smother their merchandise in rainbow flags for the month of June have dramatically scaled back this year, many wary of provoking an investigation by the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Pride events across the US are facing budget shortfalls as corporate sponsors duck out.
Now, with all due respect to the president, the media, and the people cited in the above article (some of whom are very smart, in fact), the idea that Trump killed Pride Month is, well, kind of stupid. Not only is the notion thoroughly ahistorical, but it also gets the causative forces in American politics precisely backward.
For starters, it’s important to remember how and when the backlash against “pride” began in earnest.
Recall that on March 31, 2023, Bud Light was not only the most popular beer sold by the world’s largest brewing company but was also the most popular beer on the planet by sales. It was, inarguably, America’s—and the world’s—go-to beer. The following day, however, everything would change. Bud Light—and LGBT “Pride”—would consciously choose to self-immolate.
The next day, Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s young, smart, and talented vice president of marketing, launched her campaign to remake the brand and to bring it into the 21st century. She worried the beer she had been hired to keep at #1 was associated too closely with the common folk. She fretted about its history of “fratty and out-of-touch humor” and believed she had been tasked with making it more “inclusive…and lighter and brighter and different.”
As part of that more “inclusive” strategy, Heinerscheid and her team contracted with a young TikTok sensation named Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand in a short video. And so, on that fateful day, April Fool’s Day 2023, Mulvaney, who is famously and flamboyantly transgender, uploaded a video in which he/she, dressed like Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” sang the praises of the new, au courant Bud Light.
The rest, as they say, is history. Within a week, Bud Light’s sales tanked, the result of a conservative-led boycott of the brand. Within a month, it had lost precisely what it sought to protect, its vaunted status as the nation’s best-selling beer. By Independence Day, Bud Light was no longer even in the top 10 best-selling beers in America, having fallen all the way down to 14th place.
And then the real collapse began.
As sales of Bud Light fell, so did the sales of the brewer’s other brands. And so did AB InBev’s stock. From its high on April 6, the company’s share price fell more than 18%. Before the bleeding finally stopped in October, the share price had fallen by more than one-fifth.
Recall as well that two months after Bud Light’s disastrous fling with Dylan Mulvaney, Target Corporation, a longtime LGBTQ ally, launched its most aggressive Pride Month campaign ever, featuring children’s Pride displays, a “tuck”-friendly swimsuit for men who wished to hide their…uhhh…manhood, and designs from a UK brand that also produced “Satanic” designs.
Again, the backlash was swift and merciless. As with Bud Light, Target was the object of considerable online and cable news outrage. The company saw its sales fall dramatically in the face of a conservative-led boycott and, in time, saw its share price collapse as well. The nation’s “normies” had, once again, done what had never been done before and what was once thought impossible: they had organized and sustained a conservative boycott of a major corporation. They had been pushed too far by what they saw as aggressive corporate politicization, and they had successfully and spectacularly pushed back against it.
The truth of the matter is that Donald Trump didn’t have anything to do with the death of Pride Month. “Pride” killed itself, as it was destined eventually to do. It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason, after all, namely because it is inherently self-destructive. “Pride,” as Proverbs famously puts it, “goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” And fall they did.
Ever since these twin retail disasters, American companies have been notably (and understandably) more circumspect about their efforts to promote politically divisive themes, especially LGBT Pride. Many corporations—with a push from conservative activist Robby Starbuck—ended their participation with and sponsorship of the Human Rights Campaign, the LGBT activist group that helped turn Pride Month into a national event and actively punishes companies it perceives as less than ideally supportive of its agenda.
And note that all of this—from the Bud Light debacle to the Target disaster to Robby Starbuck’s humiliation of the HRC—took place while Joe Biden was president and Donald Trump was a private citizen. Indeed, the first two took place before Trump had even secured a single convention delegate or Republican primary vote. In other words, the media can blame him all they want for the death of Pride Month, but the timing is off.
Additionally, and more to the point, the media—and countless others, including most Democratic elected officials—radically misunderstand how American politics works. Trump didn’t cause the cultural backlash that killed Pride Month. The cultural backlash that killed Pride Month also caused Trump. Or at least it caused his re-election.
In my nearly three decades as a macro-political analyst for large institutional investors, I have always insisted on the existence and relevance of one simple truth that defines American politics and its inevitable twists and turns: Washington is not where the biggest and most important decisions are made in this country. Those decisions are made in the states, cities, towns, school districts, churches, and families of the nation. Washington is merely where the score is kept.
Or, as Andrew Breitbart more pithily put it, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 because the American people rejected the foreign policy and cultural excesses of the Obama years. Likewise, Trump was re-elected in 2024 because the voters rejected Biden’s even more significant cultural excesses. Trump wasn’t elected to convince normies to dislike Pride, Pride Month, or “woke” more generally. He was elected because the normies had already come to loathe them all on their own.