Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

The New Protesters Defying Donald Trump: His Customers

By MICHAEL BARBAROOCT. 17, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/politics/donald-trump-brand-reaction.html?ref=business&_r=0

Morrie Gold is not a placard-waving political protester. He is a 69-year-old retired doctor in Pennsylvania.

But he recently participated in a quiet act of rebellion: He and 11 golfing buddies canceled their annual trip to a Florida resort owned by Donald J. Trump to express their disgust with his remarks about women, immigrants and minorities.

“For me,” Mr. Gold said, “it’s an ethical statement.”

Political demonstrations are alien to Margaret Riordan, too. “I’m just an old white lady from Illinois,” she said. But when friends invited the 60-year-old and her husband to dinner inside Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, a one-woman boycott was born.

“Pick another place,” Ms. Riordan firmly told her friends. “By crossing that threshold, I’m saying Donald Trump’s O.K. I won’t do that.”

The reservation was canceled.

Across the country, voters alarmed by the tenor of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the emerging accounts of his personal conduct are engaging in spontaneous, unorganized and inconspicuous acts of protest that take direct aim at perhaps his most prized possession: his brand name.

In more than two dozen interviews, they described creative methods of punishing his economic empire and expunging the once-esteemed reminders of him from their lives, closets, golf bags and bookshelves over the past few months. They have thrown out — or cut up — Trump neckties, called off stays at Trump hotels, even stopped imbibing Trump wines.

...

For some seething voters, returning Trump products is no longer feasible: They sit, well worn, inside their closets and dressers.

So they are taking creative measures.

After hearing Mr. Trump rail against the loss of American manufacturing jobs to lower-paid foreign workers, Brian Betteridge, 33, a teacher outside Philadelphia, checked the label on his Trump Signature Collection button-down dress shirt.

“Made in Indonesia,” it read, according to Mr. Betteridge.

“I tossed it right into the garbage,” he said. “At that point, it represented all of these things about him that I could not stand.”

The shirt had been a gift from his grandmother. “I haven’t told her,” he said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/us/politics/donald-trump-brand-reaction.html?ref=business&_r=0