President Donald Trump meets with business leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Jan. 31. | Getty Corporate America tackles Trump Major American companies are increasingly willing to take on the new president publicly — despite the risk of a backlash.

The resistance to President Donald Trump’s agenda is spreading fast across corporate America.

Technology giants like Google and Facebook are leading the movement. But more traditional American brands like Budweiser, Coca-Cola and 84 Lumber used the Super Bowl, watched by more than 100 million people, to brand themselves in sharp contrast to Trump’s nationalist agenda on immigration and trade.


An early calculus is developing around American board rooms from Silicon Valley to the heartland to New York: While taking on Trump risks sparking anger from an irascible and highly voluble president, staying quiet and potentially alienating customers and employees could be much worse in the long run.

“This is in many ways uncharted territory for American companies and they are faced with some very difficult choices,” said Harvard Business School professor Nancy F. Koehn, an expert in corporate behavior. “What many appear to be deciding is that there are important organizational, foundational values at risk that they believe are important to their success. This is about long-term self-interest as well as right action.”

The most outspoken opponents of Trump’s agenda, especially his now-suspended effort to ban travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim nations, come from the technology industry.

Tech has the most to lose both immediately from travel disruptions for highly valued employees and in the long run from being seen as inhospitable places for highly educated, mostly progressive consumers and workers.

In the hours after Trump signed his controversial immigration order, the top executives from Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber dispatched notes to their staffs, pledging support to those affected by the travel ban while stressing their opposition to the policy.

Google founder Sergey Brin — initially without much fanfare — joined a Jan. 28 protest of the order at San Francisco International Airport. Days later, roughly 2,000 employees of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, staged a walkout at their Mountain View, Calif., campus, a demonstration joined by Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive.

The widespread, passionate opposition, however, has brought about major headaches for those companies like Uber that have simultaneously sought to forge a relationship with Trump. The ride-hailing app’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, faced weeks of sustained backlash for even joining the president’s so-called Strategic and Policy Forum.

Kalanick initially pledged to use his seat at the table to raise the Valley’s views on immigration. But the protest of the company — and an online campaign to delete its app — proved so overwhelming that he withdrew from the advisory board hours before its Friday meeting.

The Valley’s sole remaining participant — Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla — faced similar criticism on Twitter for advising Trump. In response, Musk wrote Saturday: “I believe this is doing good, so will remain on council & keep at it. Doing otherwise would be wrong.”

While tech is at the center of the corporate resistance, the Super Bowl saw a handful of ads that appeared to take on Trump from companies generally not seen as likely to wade into risky political commentary.

Budweiser took heat from some conservatives on Twitter for running an ad telling the story of founder Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant the ad said was “not wanted” in America.

84 Lumber, a construction supply company, aired a spot featuring a Hispanic mother and daughter making their way to America. The original ad, rejected by Fox as too political, showed the pair running into a giant wall, a clear reference to Trump’s long-promised barrier with Mexico.

Coca-Cola re-ran an earlier spot celebrating diverse groups singing “America the Beautiful” with the tagline “together is beautiful.” Audi ran an ad with the tagline “Drive Progress” that took on the issue of equal pay for women.

View 2017 Super Bowl commercials tackle immigration, gender pay gap A collection of ads that will air during the Super Bowl LI.

None of these ads took on Trump directly, illustrating one preferred course for big companies that may like the new president’s promises of lower taxes and fewer regulations but don’t want to associate directly with Trump’s early social policies.

The branding efforts also show corporate America is well aware of Trump’s historically low public approval ratings and wants to set itself up as having a different vision of the nation.

The ads also displayed the risks of even indirectly taking on Trump. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted comments critical of the Audi ad including one that said, “You lied about your emissions. Stop lecturing Americans and start fixing your company and telling the truth.” The younger Trump also retweeted a post ripping the Budweiser ad that read: “ICYMI: That Budweiser Super Bowl ad everyone is talking about is a LIE!”

Trump himself has yet to respond to the Super Bowl ads in any direct way but he has shown a strong inclination to go after individual companies that displease him, a group that now includes General Motors, Lockheed Martin and Toyota, among others.

But the early consensus is that, with social media users quick to rip anyone seen as collaborating with the Trump administration, the safest path is to stake out ground in at least oblique opposition to the new president.

And if the more strident nationalist and protectionist voices inside the White House win out over more moderate Trump advisers, the criticism of the president from corporate America could quickly become more direct and strident — especially given the president’s fondness for tariffs that could hammer automakers, retailers and many other industries that rely on a global supply chain.

“If Trump stays this unpopular,” said one Republican consultant who does work for some of the biggest American companies, “people aren’t going to be that afraid of him for very long.”