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For a political organization, nothing says “we played ourselves” quite like being forced to retreat from a position you never should have held to begin with.
That’s the exact scenario Republicans find themselves in today after many of them spent weeks throwing a tantrum over — of all things — beer ads.
In the last month, conservatives have raged over Bud Light’s brand partnership with actor and social media influence Dylan Mulvaney. The mere fact that Bud Light did business with Mulvaney, a trans woman, and depicted her on one of their promotional cans was enough to move many conservatives to call for people to “boycott Bud Light” and its parent company, Anheuser-Busch. That is, until last week, when many conservatives apparently learned Anheuser-Busch is a major donor to Republicans.
Oops.
One of the most public people to bow down to Bud Light was professional troll Donald Trump Jr., who on Thursday told listeners of his podcast that the right-wing reaction was an example of conservatives’ tendency for "shooting first and aiming second."
Trump said his staff researched Anheuser-Busch’s political giving and found the company’s employees and political action committee gave more to Republicans than Democrats.
“That’s literally almost unheard of in corporate America, where it’s really easy to go woke, where they do so constantly, where there’s a consequence to actually being a conservative,” Trump claimed, saying the conservative donations are “kind of a big deal.”
Setting aside the fact that Trump’s portrayal of corporate America as a bastion of liberalism is completely false, note what he’s admitting here. He and others are saying Republicans should flaunt their purportedly principled transphobia, except when doing so defies rich donors who ply the conservative movement with cash.
You know: bigotry, but make it capitalistic.
Trump's call for what was effectively a truce with Anheuser-Busch was met with predictable anger from many conservatives online. But he isn’t the only conservative seeking to quash the outrage.
As The Daily Beast notes, the National Republican Congressional Committee quietly deleted a tweet it posted that was meant to fundraise off of anti-Bud Light sentiment. (OpenSecrets, the political spending tracker, indicates Anheuser-Busch gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative organizations in 2022, including the NRCC.)
According to The Daily Beast:
On Saturday morning, the powerful committee that provides support to Republican congressional campaigns blasted out a tweet calling for supporters to donate to the NRCC and, in exchange, be given a custom drink koozie. “Thanks to Dylan Mulvaney, we can all finally admit that Bud Light tastes like water,” the NRCC said [in a since-deleted tweet]. “With our new koozie’s, you can make sure no one confuses Bud Light with real beer ever again.”
The NRCC's cup holder, using a font similar to Bud Light's, was meant to mock people’s pronoun preferences: “This beer identifies as a water," it read. Ooh, burn.
Personally, I think the “Bud Light tastes like water” line isn't inaccurate. It’s pitiful though that the GOP is acknowledging this solely to target a company for associating with a trans person. And it’s even more pitiful that Republicans pushing this line of attack were brought to heel by their watery beer overlords.
One question for Republicans: How’s that taste?