Americans have a secret weapon against Trump

The disconnect is, most likely, the result of simple cost/benefit analysis. For the American business elite, the cost of crossing Trump is high and specific: He might deny your mergers, initiate bogus civil rights investigations, or even attempt to throw you in jail. By contrast, the costs of compliance are low: Perhaps a majority of voters might disapprove, but they can’t really do anything about it.

Or can they?

Consider, as one piece of evidence, a brand-new study on the fortunes of Elon Musk’s Tesla. The researchers show, using careful empirical analysis, that Musk’s foray into far-right politics — and especially his role into the Trump administration — have cost his company enormously.

All told, the researchers find, Tesla would have sold as many as 1.25 million more cars in the past three years had Musk behaved differently. This is equivalent to roughly 83 percent of Tesla’s actual sales during this period, meaning the company could have nearly doubled its sales had its CEO not alienated its heavily Democratic customer base.

Partially, this is a story of individual liberal consumers making their own choices. But it’s also the story of an organized movement — the #TeslaTakedown boycotts and protests that began in response to the cruelty and lawlessness of Musk’s DOGE.

And the Tesla protests were not one-offs: There are other moments in Trump’s second term that show liberal consumer boycotts can inflict real damage on corporations who align with Trump or bend the knee.

When you look at all of this together, you can start to see the contours of a real and actionable plan for challenging elite quiescence in the face of democratic backsliding — one with deep roots in the history and theory of civil resistance.

The Tesla study, written by a team of four researchers at Yale University, tracks trends in monthly auto sales between 2018 and the first quarter of 2025. In the early years of the investigation, Tesla was on an upward trajectory — buoyed by rising enthusiasm for electric vehicles (EVs).

But the authors find that this growth began to slow sharply at a very specific moment in time: October 2022, the month that Musk purchased Twitter. That moment marked Musk’s definitive entry in the political fray on the Republican side, and it seemed to have transformed the way that Tesla’s mostly Democratic consumers saw the company.

The researchers’ careful estimates, based on county-level data, showed that the company lost out on an astonishing amount of sales. It also showed that these losses were higher in heavily Democratic counties, suggesting Musk was specifically being punished by liberal consumers. Moreover, it found a concomitant rise in sales of EVs and hybrids made by Musk’s competitors — suggesting these consumers were not moving away from Tesla specifically, not electric cars in general.

But for present purposes, the most relevant finding is one buried deep in the paper’s analysis: a sharp increase in the size of Tesla’s sales loss this year.

The researchers found that, relative to the overall average, the size of the sales loss roughly doubled its average level in the first quarter of 2025 — with the company losing out on nearly 150 percent of actual sales, rather than the between 67 percent and 83 percent average throughout the entire sample.

While the study’s authors do not attempt a causal analysis of Tesla’s 2025 collapse, the reason is not hard to divine: That’s when Musk went from backing the GOP to actually participating in the Trump administration. His role in DOGE prompted an organized campaign of boycotts and protests, called #TeslaTakedown, designed explicitly to punish Musk financially — with sales of the flagship Model Y reaching their lowest point since late 2022.

Here’s a simple stat to clarify things: By March of this year, only 5 percent of Kamala Harris voters had a positive view of Musk. These are most of the people who want to buy electric cars. So they took their business elsewhere.

At first blush, this might all seem like old news: a dispatch from the ancient and forgotten era of this April.

But the absolute size of the effect of the damage to Tesla documented in the paper suggests that ordinary liberals are extremely willing to put their money where their mouth is: to wield financial power as a means of punishing those they hold responsible for at least part of Trump’s attack on democracy. The fact that Musk openly cited Tesla’s revenue problems as a reason for his resignation from DOGE suggested that this kind of economic coercion can have a major impact on elite decision-making.

Nor is Tesla a one-off.

When Target announced it was scrapping its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders in January, it got hit by a liberal boycott campaign which Target’s own executive admitted had damaged sales — forcing them to release a PR statement about its “unwavering” support for diversity as damage control.

The Tesla study is, in short, unusually rigorous empirical validation of what these events suggest: that liberals are increasingly willing to punish companies they see as aligned with Trump, and that they’re willing to do so at scale and for extended periods of time.

This creates a large and mostly untapped potential avenue for pro-democracy organizing. The Disney+ campaign was short-lived and very specific; the Target boycott has been relatively small-scale. There is a potential to take the energy that powered a multiyear blow to Tesla’s sales and channel it strategically, directing pain at specific companies who are helping implement Trump’s antidemocratic policies or complying with them in an especially egregious way.

Obviously, asking anti-Trump consumers to boycott many different companies at once is unrealistic. Rather, any such campaign should target one specific and recognizable company at a time, ideally one that is relatively dependent on left-leaning consumers for revenue. Organizers should target them in retaliation for a very specific act of complicity or compliance, and rally liberal consumers to end purchases at this shop unless and until they reverse course.

In practice, then, this would look a lot like what happened with Disney+ — only repeated enough times that it becomes a threat companies have to take very seriously.

To understand the logic of a boycott strategy, it’s worth looking a little bit more abstractly at the theory of nonviolent resistance.

In a lot of popular understandings, nonviolence is about symbolism. You get so many people on the street, making their case in a peaceful and morally unimpeachable way, that their opponents come to see the justice of their cause and the inevitability of their victory. This is often linked to the statistic that no government has ever survived sustained protest by 3.5 percent of the citizenry.

This understanding is partially correct: The moral power of nonviolence, spread through images like police beating on unarmed protesters, really does help galvanize support and social change. But it’s only one part of the story. These campaigns also rely on coercion: on changing the cost-benefit analysis of key actors, be it regime apparatchiks or business leaders, on complying with the Trump administration. They do so by putting pressure on them in a strategic manner: staging specific actions, be they demonstrations or strikes or boycotts, that signal that compliance will be costly.

For this reason, the civil rights movement wasn’t just street demonstrations and sit-ins. It also took actions, like the famous Montgomery bus boycott, designed to impose costs on elite actors who sustained or supported segregation.

“Standing beside love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion,” as Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech four days after Rosa Parks’ arrest.

This logic also applies in more contemporary struggles against democratic backsliding — like the early 2023 Israeli protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to seize control of the Supreme Court.

Organizers put millions in the streets, and that mattered on its own. But they also called strikes and got military reservists to publicly refuse to show up if the bill was passed. The sense that passing the bill would do severe damage to the nation, led then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to speak out against it. Ultimately, Netanyahu withdrew the bill (though the government quietly pushed elements of it after October 7, using the Gaza war as cover).

Now, the United States is a very different country — we have neither the union density for a general strike nor mass military conscription. Here, the focus on coercing corporate compliance makes more sense, in part because there’s recent precedent. And not just on the left.

In 2023, right-wing consumers organized a boycott movement against Bud Light — in retaliation for an ad featuring a trans influencer — that helped speed a broad decline in “woke” corporate advertising. More recently, right-wing consumers successfully wielded similar tactics to force Cracker Barrel to back down from a logo change that they perceived as erasing an old white mascot. There’s no reason consumers on the left can’t do the same thing, especially given how engaged rank-and-file Democrats appear to be in the wake of No Kings.

To be clear: The point is not that you can punish all corporations to change all their policies. Changing consumption patterns is costly, and ordinary citizens have limits as to how much they’ll do for a political cause.

Rather, the goal is to make a few more high-profile examples that change the calculations of the many. If there are perceived risks on the consumer end that counterbalance the government pressures to do something like take Kimmel off the air, then CEOs might approach their overall positioning differently. And if there’s an organized movement that could threaten to target your corporation sooner or later, the threat will be more credible than it presently is.

Democratic backsliding in the United States is a multifaceted problem, and a complacent corporate class is only one of many conditions helping it continue. But it is a problem, and one about which much more can and should be done.

The Tesla research, as well as some recent events, shows that the raw material is there. The question is whether anyone is willing and capable of doing something with it.