Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus was a rabid Trump supporter (Photo: Rabbi Pinchas Taylor)
For Bernie Marcus, Home Depot’s late billionaire founder, this year would have been a bitter payback for his rabid support of Donald Trump.
A year before the election, Marcus made an empassioned plea to elect Trump, claiming he possessed “judgment, strength, decisiveness, and courage” during his first term in office.
Marcus died Nov. 4, 2024, at the age of 95, a day before votes were cast. But he got his wish; Trump was elected. It would have been bittersweet if he had lived to see the results.
The president’s on-again, off-again tariffs have crushed consumer confidence, caused rising prices, higher unemployment and rising federal debt.
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What’s more, the trends are crushing his legacy, the company he founded in 1978 with one store in Marietta, Ga.
Today, Home Depot’s stock (HD) plummeted 4 percent in early trading after the home improvement retailer missed third quarter results. The company also lowered its full-year outlook, largely due to the Trump economy.
Analysts cited consumer reluctance to take on home improvement projects for the fall off in sales.
“While underlying demand in the business remained relatively stable sequentially, an expected increase in demand in the third quarter did not materialize,” said one analyst.
“We believe that consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing are disproportionately impacting home improvement demand.”
Full-year profits are expected to fall more sharply. Adjusted earnings per share are expected to drop by 5 percent, exceeding the 2 percent decline the company expected as last as August.
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CEO Ted Decker blamed third quarter results on a “lack of storms”, which resulted in “greater than expected pressure in certain categories.”
It’s hard to see how Decker will last much longer in the executive suite without a quck turnaround.
Partly because of Marcus’s politics, Home Depot has been hit by successive calls for a boycott.
“We Ain’t Buying It” is the latest campaign this year, which has been grabbing headlines leading into the holiday season.
Aside from Marcus’s political affiliation, the company has been criticized for removing DEI initiatives and allowing ICE immigration raids on its properties, rounding up migrants who gather there looking for work.
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In Nov. 2023, Marcus wrote a column published by realclearpolitics.com, calling for Trump’s election. It’s fraught with right-wind disinformation and some glaring conflicts of interest.
One disclosure Marcus failed to make right off the bat is his huge investment in Trump’s political career.
Nearly 90 percent of Trump’s $236 million haul in 2020 campaign contributions came from just eight billionaire benefactors: Marcus and his second wife Billi Wilma donated $17 million.
Marcus began on an empathic note, noting his age, then 94, and his sadness at the state of America.
“Like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America,” he wrote in a commentary.
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“I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.”
But the column goes downhill from there. It plunges into right-wing Fox News disinformation to make the case for the former president, who, at the time, was facing 91 criminal charges in four separate cases.
“I understand the frustration of some of my Republican friends who do not like or are offended by things Donald Trump does and says. I, too, have been frustrated at times, but we cannot let his brash style be the reason we walk away from his otherwise excellent stewardship of the United States during his first term in office,” he writes.
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Marcus’s comment is Orwellian, all the more so because he was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, who fled Russia to avoid persecution.
His plea to overlook Trump’s “brash style” is an argument Jews made to justify voting for Hitler in 1933. Jewish voters overlooked Hitler’s “brash style” and considered his threats of Jewish annihilation in “Mein Kampf” to be just so much political posturing.
“Public fears over economic woes and political uncertainty made the Nazis’ solutions to the nation’s problems appealing. The Nazis downplayed more extreme aspects of their agenda,” according to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Trump may or may not rise to the level of Hitlerian mendacity, but his rhetoric of late has been spiked with terms that could have been lifted from one of Hitler’s fascist screeds.
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Trump claims to this day that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America;” he called for detention camps and mass deportations; he called Americans “vermin,” threatened the free press and claimed his opponents were “communists,” socialists, and “the enemy within.”
He promised in his second term to unleash the military on dissident protesters and seek revenge against anyone who criticized him, including former members of his own cabinet.
For the most part, Trump has stayed true to his word, roiling largely Democratic cities with ICE raids and military deployments.
Marcus’ claim that Trump provided “otherwise excellent stewardship” of the country is nothing less than Orwellian newsspeak.
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He praised Trump for his “judgment, strength, decisiveness, and courage” during his term in office when he clearly lacked all three. The evidence he cites is Trump’s order to murder Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and efforts to “dissuaded Russia from invading Ukraine.”
“Many, including myself, believe that Hamas would not have unleashed its barbarism and cruelty on Israel if Donald Trump was our president today,” he writes.
Soeimani’s murder, however, did just the opposite.
It inflamed the Middle East, increased Iran’s support for radical Islamist groups, led to vows of vengeance and set the stage for Hamas’ invasion of Israel. The terror group began planning its invasion during the Trump administration.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 before Trump took office, and the conflict raged all during his administration. He did nothing to bring peace to the region.
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He was in the process of dismantling NATO when he lost in 2020, and was an embarrassment fo fawning over dictators like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong Un.
His greatest foreign policy achievement, the Abraham Accords, between Israel and two minor Arab states failed to lead to peace in the region. Saudi Arabia refused to sign it.
The civil war in Yemen broke out during his administration, and his Israel/Palestinian peace initiative was roundly rejected by Palestinian representatives.
He further inflamed the region by brokering the largest U.S./Saudi arms deal in the Kingdom’s history.
His tariff war with China caused prices to rise in the United States, nearly wrecked the U.S. farm industry and caused goods that Home Depot sells, such as lumber and hardware, to skyrocket in price,
Trump’s time in office left a trail of wreckage domestically as well.
He mismanaged the COVID epidemic, directly causing tens of thousands of deaths.
Trump was so derelict in office he played golf 296 times during his administration, a record, costing taxpayers $144 million, spent mostly at his own clubs.
He told more than 30,000 lies in office and continues to lie, including the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
The 2020 election was the first time the nation did not have a peaceful transition of power in 242 years, going back to its founding. Trump allegedly fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection, fake elector schemes in several states and tried to coerce votes in Georgia.
All during his presidency, the Chinese government rented a whole floor in Trump Tower in New York City and paid a higher price per square foot than other office tenants in the building.
The state-owned Chinese bank that occupied the space paid $7 million in rent, even though it rented twice the space in a nearby building. It moved out around the time Trump left the White House, according to Forbes.
Trump’s business career is no less a calamity.
He’s gone through six bankruptcies. Trump University and the Trump Charity were shut down for fraud.
He’s started and failed at a dozen companies trying to profit off his “brand” and his real estate empire has largely kept afloat on fraudulent valuations, sketchy bank loans and foreign cash, according to court records in his New York state trial and other sources.
Trump’s second term has been dominated by tariff wars and his connection to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
If only Bernie Marcus had lived to see it.
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