Trump praises Sydney Sweeney ad, but does he know American Eagle is super WOKE? | Opinion

President Donald Trump took time away from making America great again to praise the recent American Eagle jeans ad starring Sydney Sweeney, hailing it for not being “WOKE.”

But I have an urgent message for President Trump: SIR, YOU HAVE FALLEN INTO A WOKENESS TRAP THAT I ASSUME WAS SET BY RADICAL LEFTISTS!

If you’re a patriotic MAGA supporter like me who has been applauding the company for triggering the libs with its Sweeney ad, which features the “Euphoria” star talking about having “good jeans,” you might want to sit down. I have discovered that American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. is – and it pains me to write this – incredibly, unconscionably woke.

American Eagle used the Sydney Sweeney ad to lure Trump into a woke trap!

The company clearly tried to avoid wokeness detection by avoiding the usual red-flag DEI and instead calling its anti-American policy “IDEA,” which stands for “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access.”

AEO’s corporate website is riddled with wildly liberal ideas like this: “Difference and individuality make AEO stronger, higher-performing and more innovative.”

There are sentences like this that absolutely reek of the kind of inclusivity President Trump and his administration have been working so hard to defeat: “A sense of belonging is critical for associates to bring their whole, authentic selves to work.”

Authentic selves? Where am I, in some blue-state coffee shop surrounded by communist libs talking about their feelings?

MAGA world has rallied around Sweeney and American Eagle

Given the way my fellow MAGA Republicans reacted to the Sweeney blue-jeans ad, I thought American Eagle was a company I could support. The sensible right saw a few people on the left claiming that the “good jeans” ad was messaging that a blond, blue-eyed white woman was genetically superior. So everyone from Fox News to Vice President JD Vance got their dander up and slammed the leftist ninnies.

“So you have a pretty girl doing a jeans ad and they can’t help but freak out,” Vance said on a podcast recently. “It reveals a lot more about them than it does us.”

Right on! It was clear, at that point, that all reasonable Republicans should wear American Eagle jeans to prove their Americanness. That’s why I went out and bought 20 pairs of them, confident that they would protect the bottom half of my body from wokeness.

Trump praises 'Republican' Sweeney and says her jeans ad is 'HOTTEST'

Then, on Aug. 4, the man himself, President Donald J. Trump, took to Truth Social to hail Sweeney as “a registered Republican” who “has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there.” His post concluded with: “Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.”

BOOM! To celebrate, I put a second pair of American Eagle jeans on over the pair I was already wearing.

Everything seemed perfect until I learned the truth about AEO.

Turns out American Eagle is as woke as the rest of the lefties

I saw that the company celebrated – gulp – Pride Month.

I found the company’s nefarious IDEA policy.

I came across a 2022 AEO post that read: “At AEO, we celebrate the diversity of one through the inclusion of many. Throughout the month of June, we will be celebrating associates who are members of the LGBTQIA+ community – highlighting their accomplishments, learning about their unique roles and hearing about their experience at AEO!”

My two pairs of jeans almost fell off.

When I saw an AEO brand talking about 'systemic racism,' my jeans fell off

And then I found that back in 2020, the month after George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, one of AEO’s brands, Aerie, posted, “We stand with the Black community,” writing that “THE LIVES OF ALL BLACK PEOPLE MATTER” and that “the more we understand systemic racism the more we can take action.”

I referred to the MAGA-branded WOKE-to-English dictionary that I wrote and sell on Etsy, and sure enough, that’s woke.

Those monsters at American Eagle clearly recruited Sweeney, an innocent Republican, and used her to lure President Trump, Fox News and the entire MAGA movement into supporting a company that is, pardon my language, WOKE AF!!

It's like we can't trust corporations to be honest about anything

I guess I can take a little comfort knowing this also swings back at the handful of libs who got riled up about the Sweeney ad in the first place and condemned American Eagle as right-wing eugenicists.

It’s almost as if corporations insincerely play both sides of the fence, benefit from controversy of any sort and don’t really have any strong beliefs outside of making money.

Didn’t see that coming.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk