Donald Trump’s tweets and rantings are running out of puff – just look at the stockmarket reaction to the jihad he and his conservative supporters launched against sports wear group, Nike for hiring rebel US NFL star, Colin Kaepernick in the firm’s new marketing campaign.
Kaepernick achieved notoriety in the US for kneeling during the playing of the US national anthem at the start of NFL games in 2016. He was quarterback for the San Francisco Forty Niners at the time.
He is now not playing and is suing the NFL and its owners over his exclusion. When his hiring by Nike was made public last week, Trump criticised the company (and Kaepernick) and called on his supporters to boycott the company.
So there was a flood of social media positions of people cutting up or burning Nike products and the company’s shares dropped, which mainstream media grabbed and reported on, attributing them to the power of Trump’s social media activity.
Trump continued over the weekend (now known as his Saturday and Sunday morning tweetstorms by “The President in Tweet”) retweeting posts and memes about the anthem controversy. He kicked off his attack on the company with a brief tweet, “What was Nike thinking?”
He ignored news that Nike had seen an enormous online sales boost since the story broke last Thursday with an independent report of a 31% jump in online sales last week (http://time.com/5390884/nike-sales-go-up-kaepernick-ad/).
On Monday wall Street investors took note of that story and not Trump’s hysterical tweets and pushed Nike shares up to a close of $US82.10. That is $1 above the $US81.10 level the shares were at last Tuesday when the campaign story broke and Trump started his attacks.
Deadline.com commented “The fact that the president’s attacks have ultimately had no effect on its stock represents something of a milestone in the Trump Era. His past outbursts have had a more tangible impact on companies, prompting entire new chapters in the corporate strategy playbook for how to respond to his tweeted broadsides.”
The rise in the share price continues the strong performance of Nike shares in the past year – they are up 58% and are outperforming the rest of the market.
