President Donald Trump’s “American First” policies are fueling a new wave of anti-American sentiment overseas – and that means a boycott of American-made products.
That’s according to a New York Times report out Friday, which added that the “the strongest momentum” behind the boycott of U.S. goods abroad appears to be from countries that have been on the receiving end of Trump’s direct threats, such as Denmark and Canada.
Products like Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Pepsi-Cola and even streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video are just a few of the goods and services foreign consumers have reported adding to the blacklist.
“I felt a sense of powerlessness,” said Denmark school principal Bo Albertus, who runs a 90,000-member Danish Facebook group devoted to boycotting American goods. “We all feel that we are doing something,” he told the Times. “We are acting on our frustration.”
But one of the “hardest-hit American brands abroad” might be the Elon Musk-owned Tesla after the world's richest person assumed his role as head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and stoked anger with his actions.
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“He has also promoted far-right parties in Europe on X, the social media platform he owns,” the Times added. “In Germany, Europe’s largest market for electric vehicles, sales of Tesla cars fell 76 percent in February compared with a year earlier, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.”
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the Times that consumers have the ability to spread their message more than ever before thanks to social media and the interconnected global economy.
“America has done many questionable things over the years,” she said, “but I don’t think even the Vietnam War could have triggered a campaign like this, simply because social media was not available.”
And business leaders are taking notice of the potential costs, the Times added in its report on Friday.
Michael Medline, the chief executive of Empire, Canada’s second-biggest supermarket company, told the publication this month that the company’s sales of U.S. products were “rapidly dropping” because of a growing demand for non-American products, according to the report.
And, the company added, that the decline is expected to continue “as Canada’s retaliatory tariffs make U.S. goods more expensive to import.”