The Real Reason Trump Is Pushing ‘Buy American’
The marketing slogan is supposed to alter consumer habits and bolster domestic manufacturing, but its long history reveals darker motivations.
When a horde of angry colonists barged aboard ships in Boston Harbor to pitch hundreds of chests of imported tea into the water, some of them suspected they were fomenting a revolution. They probably didn’t realize they were also galvanizing a marketing campaign that would endure for centuries.
The Boston Tea Party was the pinnacle of the “nonimportation movement,” in which colonists protested British rule by boycotting goods from overseas and shaming others into doing the same. For early Americans, this outburst of economic nationalism was existential: It helped spread the view that England was an outside enemy and encouraged people to act against the country’s economic domination. More recently, the concept has been winnowed down to something pithier: Buy American.