Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive officer.
Photographer: Vincent Tullo for Bloomberg BusinessweekWalmart Wants to Be Something for Everyone in a Divided America
The world’s largest retailer has built an Apple-esque corporate campus in Bentonville, is selling Gucci online and is playing nice with Trump. Will any of it work?
It’s been part of the job for every chief executive officer of Walmart for the past half-century to work with US presidents, and for Doug McMillon, Donald Trump’s first tour in the White House was no different. The two got to know each other during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Walmart secured masks and gloves for the public and turned its store parking lots into testing sites. But that didn’t stop the CEO of the world’s biggest retailer, whose political credo might best be described as thou shall do nothing to alienate the customer, from speaking out on measures he disagreed with. McMillon condemned Trump’s response to a violent 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying “he missed a critical opportunity to help bring the country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists.” He registered his disappointment again when Trump was accused of instigating the deadly riots of Jan. 6, 2021, lamenting that Americans had been divided by what he described as “the fiction of a fraudulent election.”