The letter was almost immediate taunted as a “no statement” on Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets, where outrage over a can of Bud Light depicting Mulvaney’s face fueled headlines all month.
Mulvaney, a transgender actress and influencer who has perform in the musical “Book of Mormon” and will be held conversation with President Biden, published a funny video on Instagram on April 1, showing a can of Bud Light that the company sent him, personalized with a picture of his face to celebrate the first anniversary of his release.
The right-wing backlash had been building for some time. “The Mulvaney-Bud Light video essentially served as a jumping-off point for another advertising campaign, one in which conservatives used Bud Light as a foil for their own demonstrations of their right-wing bona fides ,” wrote Philip Bump in The Washington Post. “Politicians like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) have offered social media posts calling on people to boycott Bud Light,” while musicians are “popular among conservatives audience spoke out against the brand. Kid Rock used an AR-15-style rifle to pepper several cases of beer with bullets.”
It’s unclear whether the protest has expanded beyond right-wing personalities, which it often does threat boycotts when a prominent company appears to embrace gender fluidity, or if the campaign seriously hurts the market share of Anheuser-Busch, whose stock has been falling steadily for years.
But nearly two days into the backlash, the company has shown signs that it is worried. On April 3, an Anheuser-Busch spokesman sure Fox News and other outlets that the “commemorative can is a gift” to Mulvaney “to celebrate a personal milestone and not for sale to the general public.” A Budweiser distributor cancelled a promotional event in Missouri the same week, citing concerns about employee safety. Anheuser-Busch also told Vox that working to law enforcement after the news site reported that some of its facilities had received bomb threats.
The beer giant is not alone in the conservative crosshairs. Four days after Mulvaney posted his Bud Light video, he announced a payment partnership with Nike in an Instagram post in which she modeled leggings and a sports bra, leading former Olympians Sharron Davies and Caitlyn Jenner (who is transgender herself) to criticize the brand.
Mulvaney spoke publicly about the social media bullying he faced last year on an episode of the “Onward With Rosie O’Donnell” podcast. released Tuesday. “I tried to be the most non-controversial person this past year, and somehow I still ended up being controversial,” Mulvaney said. “I think it goes back to the fact that these people, they don’t understand me, and anything I do or say is somehow taken out of context and used against me. And it’s so sad because everything that I try to put out is positive, it’s trying to connect with others who might not understand me, it’s to make people laugh or to make a kid feel seen.
Speaking Thursday on his own podcast, Donald Trump Jr. called for to end the Anheuser-Busch boycott, saying he does not support “destroying an American, an iconic, company for something like this.” (Belgium-based InBev bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008.) “The company itself is not participating in the same leftist nonsense as other big conglomerates,” Trump said. “Honestly, they’re not participating in the same trash wake that other people in the beer industry are actually doing.”
A person close to Trump Jr., who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his thinking, said Trump Jr. did not contact Anheuser-Busch, and it was a coincidence that the company’s chief executive published his open letter the next day, entitled “Our Responsibility to America.”
Whatever the purpose of Whitworth’s letter, its immediate effect was to make him as much a target of ire as Mulvaney himself. His missive was largely disparate in the thousands of responses on Twitter, either for not standing up to Mulvaney or for implicitly rejecting him. Anheuser-Busch used a new Twitter feature to hide hundreds of more profane replies that attacked Mulvaney, Whitworth and Budweiser itself.
“Put Trump in a can!!” read one of them. “Let’s see how it works?! Maybe, just maybe, you can make up for your losses.” Spokesmen for Anheuser-Busch, Nike and Mulvaney did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.