President Donald Trump has a history of claiming credit for Walmart decisions that he had nothing to do with, and on Tuesday he did it again — with a commentator for a conservative website calling him out for it.
“Yesterday, President Trump posted that ‘one of the biggest, best, and smartest retailers in America, Walmart, will be lowering prices by a lot at my administration's request to celebrate our great country's 250th birthday,’” The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell said on Wednesday. “‘Walmart will, in particular, be dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products. This is a huge deal for many millions of Americans who smartly shop at Walmart, which is a truly patriotic company who loves the USA.’”
As Rampell pointed out, Trump is obviously stating that he did something which the company routinely does all of the time.
“If you've ever shopped at Walmart, you know that they have these rolling sales and promotions all the time — that's sort of the business model for retailers like this,” Rampell said. “In fact, it's not just Walmart — there are lots of companies still running their July 4th sales and may soon have other seasonal discounts pegged to back-to-school season or similar. But sure, you know, credit our fearless leader.”
She added that Trump also falsely claimed credit for Walmart selling Thanksgiving foods at a cheaper rate last year, as well as incorrectly saying price drops in DoorDash’s State of Local Commerce report proved he had reduced inflation.
“Just like the rooster likes to take credit for the sun rising, Trump loves to take credit for things that companies were already planning to do — often because it's mutually beneficial for everyone to do this,” Rampell said. “There's the aluminum plant getting built in Alabama that the Trump White House took credit for. ‘It's doubling and tripling, and we have steel plants being built all over the country. Nobody thought they'd see that’ — even though construction for that plant began in 2022, when Biden was still president.”
After adding that Trump also claimed credit for business developments involving Corning investment in Michigan, J&J, Stargate, SoftBank and Apple, she concluded that “this is what happens when instead of a statesman in the White House, you have an influencer-in-chief — a narcissistic influencer-in-chief, at that. He can't resist a great deal, especially if that deal might help his poll numbers.”
In January, a Walmart spokesperson had to correct a Trump misstatement to CNN. After Trump falsely claimed that Walmart had closed more than 250 stores in California, the spokesperson said that “this isn’t accurate information. In fact, we actually just recently opened a new store in California." Last year, as Trump claimed his tariffs were helping American businesses, Walmart CEO Doug McMillion told the president that his tariff policy is "not good for anybody." In fact, speaking with AlterNet on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Shapiro — undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the administration of President Bill Clinton and principal economic adviser to Clinton's 1992 campaign — explained that Trump’s policies are creating extreme uncertainty within the business community.
“It's about uncertainty,” Shapiro explained. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”
Shapiro added, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”
