President Donald Trump is unequivocally disliked: The majority of Americans disapprove of his job and countless people recently appeared for “No Kings” demonstrations. Why then are a multitude of large firms and billionaires either actively supporting Trump’s assault on democracy or feebly adhering to his orders?
This divergence is, in all likelihood, the outcome of a straightforward cost/benefit assessment. For the American corporate upper class, the consequence of opposing Trump is significant and targeted: He might reject your mergers, start spurious civil rights probes, or perhaps even attempt to imprison you. Conversely, the repercussions of agreement are slight: It is possible that most of the electorate might disapprove, but they cannot truly take any action.
Or can’t they?
Consider, as one piece of evidence, a brand-new analysis on the destiny of Elon Musk’s Tesla. With meticulous empirical analysis, the researchers demonstrate that Musk’s venture into far-right politics — and particularly his involvement in the Trump administration — has had a dramatically negative impact on his firm.
In total, the researchers determine, Tesla could have marketed up to 1.25 million additional vehicles during the last three years, had Musk behaved in a different manner. This is similar to roughly 83 percent of Tesla’s genuine sales during this timeframe, implying the firm could have almost doubled its sales if its CEO had not alienated its significantly Democratic customer base.
In part, this is a tale of individual liberal consumers making their own determinations. Although, it is also the narrative of a coordinated movement — the #TeslaTakedown boycotts and demonstrations that commenced in response to the cruelty and illegality of Musk’s DOGE.
Furthermore, the Tesla protests were not isolated events: There are alternative moments in Trump’s second term that reveal liberal consumer boycotts can inflict genuine harm on businesses that affiliate with Trump or submit to him.
Examining all of this collectively, one can begin to see the outlines of a tangible and actionable strategy for questioning elite passivity when faced with democratic decline — one deeply rooted in the past and principles of civil disobedience.
Liberal consumers 1, Elon Musk 0
The Tesla analysis, composed by a group of four researchers at Yale University, tracks trends in monthly auto sales between 2018 and the initial quarter of 2025. In the early years of the investigation, Tesla was experiencing upward progress — reinforced by growing fervor for electric vehicles (EVs).
Nevertheless, the authors discover that this growth commenced to diminish sharply at a specific moment: October 2022, the month Musk acquired Twitter. That instant signified Musk’s conclusive entrance into the political arena on the Republican side, and it appeared to have altered the manner in which Tesla’s largely Democratic consumer base viewed the firm.
The researchers’ thorough estimations, drawing from county-level data, revealed that the firm forfeited a startling quantity of sales. It additionally revealed that these forfeitures were greater in heavily Democratic counties, implying Musk was specifically being penalized by liberal consumers. Furthermore, it discovered a simultaneous surge in sales of EVs and hybrids produced by Musk’s rivals — suggesting these consumers were not avoiding Tesla in particular, but not electric automobiles generally.
However, for present intents, the most pertinent discovery is one concealed within the paper’s analysis: a notable increase in the degree of Tesla’s sales loss this year.
The researchers discovered that, as opposed to the overall average, the degree of the sales forfeiture nearly doubled its average level during the initial quarter of 2025 — with the firm relinquishing nearly 150 percent of actual sales, rather than the between 67 percent and 83 percent average across the complete sample.
While the study’s authors do not attempt a causal examination of Tesla’s 2025 downfall, the explanation is not difficult to determine: That is when Musk proceeded from supporting the GOP to actually engaging in the Trump administration. His involvement in DOGE prompted a coordinated campaign of boycotts and demonstrations, termed #TeslaTakedown, designed specifically to financially penalize Musk — with sales of the flagship Model Y reaching their nadir since late 2022.
Here’s a simple statistic to clarify matters: By March of this year, just 5 percent of Kamala Harris voters held a favorable opinion of Musk. These constitute the bulk of individuals who desire to purchase electric automobiles. Consequently, they took their business elsewhere.
Tesla as blueprint for a new fight against backsliding
Initially, this might all seem like obsolete information: a communication from the ancient and forgotten era of this April.
However, the sheer magnitude of the effect of the damage to Tesla, as documented in the paper, suggests that ordinary liberals are highly eager to manifest their convictions financially: to utilize economic clout as a means of penalizing those they deem accountable for at least a segment of Trump’s assault on democracy. The fact that Musk openly cited Tesla’s revenue issues as a rationale for his departure from DOGE indicated that this kind of economic constraint can exert a major effect on elite decision-making.
Nor is Tesla an isolated case.
When Target proclaimed it was discarding its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders in January, it was subjected to a liberal boycott campaign which Target’s own executive acknowledged had impaired sales — compelling them to issue a PR declaration regarding its “unwavering” backing for diversity as damage control.
More recently, ABC/Disney’s verdict to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! culminated in a unified and effective Disney+ cancellation campaign — escalating the rate of cancellations to double its typical monthly average. Disney insiders informed Reuters that these subscription cancellations played at the very least a partial role in Kimmel’s ultimate reinstatement.
The Tesla analysis is, in summary, uncommonly thorough empirical confirmation of what these events imply: that liberals are progressively inclined to penalize firms they perceive as aligned with Trump, and that they’re prepared to do so at scale and over extended durations.
This establishes a significant and largely untapped potential avenue for pro-democracy organizing. The Disney+ campaign was short-lived and highly specific; the Target boycott has been comparatively small-scale. There exists a prospect to seize the energy that fueled a multiyear blow to Tesla’s sales and strategically channel it, directing pain at specific firms that are aiding the implementation of Trump’s antidemocratic policies or complying with them in a remarkably egregious manner.
Evidently, requesting anti-Trump consumers to boycott numerous disparate firms simultaneously is unrealistic. Instead, any such campaign should target one specific and identifiable firm at a time, optimally one that is relatively reliant on left-leaning consumers for revenue. Organizers should target them as retaliation for a highly specific act of complicity or compliance, and encourage liberal consumers to cease purchases at this establishment unless and until they reverse their course of action.
In practice, then, this would closely resemble what transpired with Disney+ — only replicated sufficiently frequently that it evolves into a threat corporations must consider with grave seriousness.
The evidence for a boycott strategy
To grasp the rationale behind a boycott strategy, it’s worthwhile to investigate the theory of nonviolent resistance in a slightly more abstract manner.
In many common understandings, nonviolence pertains to symbolism. Garnering a considerable number of individuals in the streets, articulating their perspective in a serene and morally impeccable manner, will lead their adversaries to discern the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of their triumph. This is frequently linked to the statistic that no administration has ever survived prolonged protest by 3.5 percent of the citizenry.
This comprehension is partially accurate: The ethical force of nonviolence, propagated through images like police assault on unarmed demonstrators, genuinely contributes to stimulating support and societal transformation. Nevertheless, it constitutes solely one facet of the narrative. These campaigns additionally depend on coercion: on amending the cost-benefit equation for key actors, be they regime henchmen or business magnates, concerning adhering to the Trump administration. They accomplish this by applying pressure to them in a strategic fashion: orchestrating specific actions, whether demonstrations or strikes or boycotts, that intimate that compliance will prove costly.
Erica Chenoweth, the Harvard University professor who formulated the 3.5 percent figure, expressed the point effectively in a recent article:
The principal logic of nonviolent resistance entails constructing adequate power to disrupt the status quo; developing influential coalitions among opposition actors; attaining influence over the adversary; and indicating to security forces, economic elites, civil servants, and key political elites that their enduring interests are more effectively served by refusing to uphold the existing system. By disengaging the adversary’s core supporters, the resistance movement severely curtails his alternatives.
For this rationale, the civil rights movement was not simply comprised of street demonstrations and sit-ins. It additionally undertook actions, like the renowned Montgomery bus boycott, designed to inflict repercussions on elite actors who sustained or sanctioned segregation.
“Standing alongside love invariably entails justice, and we are merely employing the instruments of justice. We are not solely employing the instruments of persuasion, but we have realized that we must employ the instruments of coercion,” as Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in a discourse four days following Rosa Parks’ arrest.
This logic is applicable in more contemporary struggles against democratic erosion — such as the early 2023 Israeli protests opposing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agenda to seize control of the Supreme Court.
Source: vox.com
