Former President Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign this week–and he did so by blasting Disney and warning the company about its future.
RELATED: I’m Sick of the Public Hatred of Disney, and You Should Be Too
On Thursday, Donald Trump told a group of conservative voters that he doesn’t like the term woke, saying that most people “can’t even define” the word.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is,” Trump said at the Westside Conservative Breakfast in Urbandale, Iowa. The idea of “wokeness” has been a central theme in the career and campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s biggest competition in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“We reject this woke ideology,” DeSantis said in his gubernatorial inaugural address in January. “We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy. We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to become optional. We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
The Florida governor signed legislation known as the “Stop WOKE Act” last year, which puts restrictions on how race can be discussed in schools and workplaces in the Sunshine State. DeSantis blasted the idea of “wokeness” once again on Tuesday as he kicked off his presidential campaign with a rally just outside of the city of Des Moines.
Despite being a self-proclaimed opponent of the word woke, Mr. Trump used the term last weekend in his scathing review of the state of affairs within The Walt Disney Company, claiming that “Disney has become a woke and disgusting shadow of its former self” while Ron DeSantis has been in the governor’s office. In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump also issued a warning to Disney.
In his Truth Social post, Mr. Trump also called out his Republican opponent in the race for the March primaries next year, saying that all of Disney’s upheaval took place “during the Governorship of ‘Rob’ DeSanctimonious” and that the Florida governor should have put an end to things long ago. Mr. Trump went further, saying that stopping the Disney debacle would have been easy to do back then and that it “still is.”
Mr. Trump isn’t alone in his sentiments about The Walt Disney Company and its current operations and ideology. Moviegoers punished Disney in 2022, refusing to take in three Disney and PIXAR film releases that year that featured “woke ideology.” Ultimately, that ideology cost Disney more than $300 million in lost revenue at the box office last year alone.