Apple, General Motors, John Deere and Facebook have at least two things in common: They’re iconic US companies and they’ve faced the wrath of former President Donald Trump.
Trump, more so than any American president in modern history, has directly targeted individual US businesses, threatening them with everything from boycotts and canceled federal contracts to unthinkably high tariffs.
Deere, the farm equipment maker founded nearly 200 years ago, became just the latest storied brand to get singled out by Trump.
The former president on Monday threatened to use his favorite weapon — massive tariffs — on Deere if the company doesn’t abandon plans to move some production from the Midwest to Mexico.
Experts warn that such a move would hurt American farmers, help Chinese manufacturers and violate Trump’s own signature trade deal. Bigger picture, the attack on Deere fits a broader pattern of Trump bullying companies when it suits him.
It’s a reminder of the chaos and unpredictability that CEOs could face if voters return Trump to the White House.
“Trump is proving himself to be an anti-capitalist,” Bill George, former CEO of medical device maker Medtronic, told CNN in a phone interview. “It’s wrong to single out companies. These are not bad companies. It’s not like they produced an unsafe product or violated US law.”
‘Enemy of the people’
Even before he reached the White House, Trump enthusiastically went after individual companies on the campaign trail.
In February 2016, during his run for president, Trump called for a boycott against Apple until the company helped the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. (Apple didn’t comply, but the FBI said it got into the phone anyway.)
Trump has repeatedly attacked Amazon, including an incident in 2018 that rattled investors where he argued the company was scamming the US Postal Service.
Trump has attacked Boeing over the cost of Air Force One, threatened General Motors over where it planned to build its cars, called out Nordstrom for dropping his daughter’s brand and blasted Merck after its then-CEO Ken Frazier quit a presidential council in protest of Trump’s comments about a White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
More recently, Meta Platforms lost billions of dollars in value in March after Trump called into CNBC and labeled Facebook “an enemy of the people.” And then of course there are the countless attacks on individual news outlets and their corporate overlords.
Late Friday, Trump threatened to prosecute Google for “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump.”
Trump’s ‘highly unusual’ attacks
Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst and professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said there have been moments where presidents have gone after particular industries causing problems.
For instance, presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy battled the steel industry. And President Teddy Roosevelt targeted specific companies that he believed were abusing the system.
“But in the modern era, a targeted approach like this is highly unusual,” said Zelizer.
Trump’s approach of singling out companies can distort markets and create an inhospitable environment for businesses, Zelizer said.
“It can create dangerous incentives for corrupt decisions by presidents who act for political reasons rather than economic reasons,” Zelizer said, adding that Trump’s tactics are a “fundamental contradiction with conservative philosophy.”
‘Definition of insane’
Trump raised eyebrows by threatening to impose 200% tariffs on Deere if the company goes forward with plans to lay off staff in the Midwest and move some production to Mexico by the end of 2026.
“I’m just notifying John Deere right now, if you do that, we’ll put a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States,” Trump said Monday during a roundtable with farmers in western Pennsylvania, adding that Deere is “hurting our farmers” and “hurting our manufacturing.”
Yet George, now an executive fellow at Harvard University, warns that a 200% tariff on Deere would backfire on the people Trump claims to be trying to help.
“It will raise prices for American farmers. Those tariffs will get passed on to the farmer,” he said. “John Deere is an outstanding company. This is an American treasure. And tariffs are only going to weaken American companies, not strengthen them.”
Christine McDaniel, a top trade official under former President George W. Bush, told CNN that if Deere responded to Trump’s tariff threat by abandoning plans to shift production to Mexico, it would make the company less competitive globally.
“Ultimately, it would lead to fewer sales, less revenue, less growth and fewer employees for John Deere,” said McDaniel, now a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
Billionaire Mark Cuban, who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, told Fox News this week that Trump’s 200% tariff threat on John Deere will just make it easy for Chinese companies to steal business from Deere.
“That is the definition of insane,” Cuban said.
A violation of Trump’s own trade deal?
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal blasted Trump for the attack on Deere.
“Hard to believe, but Donald Trump is giving US companies a reason to think Kamala Harris might be better for their business,” the Journal wrote in an opinion piece earlier this week titled, “A Deere in Trump’s political headlights.” “What Mr. Trump fails to understand is that US manufacturers compete in global markets.”
Not only do they compete in global markets, they operate under a free trade agreement in North America. Trump himself campaigned on replacing NAFTA and then signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.
Yet multiple experts told CNN that imposing a 200% tariff on Deere would be a clear violation of USMCA.
McDaniel pointed out that under USMCA, the United States agreed to a tariff schedule that states Washington agreed to a zero tariff for farming equipment, the main product that Deere makes. (McDaniel noted that, technically, the US president could declare particular imports from Mexico a national security threat and then try to impose tariffs under Section 232).
‘Do what’s right’
Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, worries that tariff threats on individual companies would set a dangerous precedent.
“It would basically be a government takeover of the company, telling them how to allocate capital,” Lovely told CNN in a phone interview. “This is running counter to what we think about as American capitalism.”
The captains of industry could face choppy waters in the coming years if Trump wins in November, with all-caps tweets (or Truths?) sending their share prices plunging and throwing their business plans into chaos.
George, the former Medtronic boss, is urging CEOs not to allow themselves to get bullied.
“Do what’s right for your company,” he said. “Do not be intimidated.”
