On Monday morning, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about actor Sydney Sweeney’s controversial ad campaign for American Eagle. The ads, showing Sweeney in various scenes sporting blue jeans, flaunting her blond hair and blue eyes to demonstrate her “great jeans” (widely read as a pun on “genes”), has been widely criticized by viewers who say it references eugenics and spreads a white nationalist message of genetic superiority; American Eagle responded to backlash in a statement posted to Instagram saying that the ad “is and always was about the jeans.” Trump’s post, which was swiftly deleted, praised Sweeney and the ad, saying that jeans were “flying off the shelves,” while calling out several companies and celebrities the president said are “woke.”
Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men.”
Trump’s now-deleted post followed his comments on Sunday, when he was asked about his thoughts on Sweeney following reports that she was registered to vote as a Republican in Florida in 2024. “If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think the ad is fantastic,” Trump said, just before boarding Marine One.
Predictably, criticism from some folks on the left has been met with a torrent of backlash and abuse from the political right. Media watchdog Media Matters reported that Fox News spent 85 minutes talking about the ad last week. Trump joining in the fray with support for the ad is perhaps no surprise; he has been struggling with public approval as he tries to wriggle his way away from the Epstein scandal at the same time many of his deeply unpopular tariffs have gone into effect.
The Sweeney/American Eagle ad discourse offers Republicans a familiar line of attack on well-worn culture war grounds. The ad is just vague enough to be deniable, yet it gives the right an opportunity to paint leftists as out-of-touch and cancel-hungry.
Some in the center haven’t been able to resist taking potshots at the left over it. Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men,” despite the fact that the ad is not a political issue and that neither the Democratic Party nor its leaders have commented on it.
But a small handful of individuals on the left have appointed themselves as stand-ins for the Democratic Party. We see this approach play out repeatedly in culture-war attacks by the right. If one vaguely left-coded person says something that the right gets upset at, in this case a handful of liberals questioning the Sweeney ad on Tik Tok, and if it then goes viral, large portions of the media and the entirety of the right wing expect every rank-and-file Democrat to answer for that one person, as we see with everyone from the White House to the vice president to conservative columnists dumping this controversy at the feet of Democrats.
This dynamic does not appear to exist for the right and Republicans, who seem uninhibited to go around burning and pillaging anything that even remotely offends conservative ideologues.
Just a few years ago, the right melted down over a Bud Light Instagram ad featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer. A mass boycott was started that threatened Anheuser-Busch’s existence as a company and myriad videos from right wingers popped up online with influencers and celebrities alike using firearms to shoot at Bud Light cans. It was the childish political meltdown to end all childish political meltdowns.
I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be. Yet I don’t recall seeing any reporters or commentators demanding that Republicans answer for the violent backlash toward Bud Light. Then-president Biden condemned bomb threats made against the company while Republicans defended the over-the-top reaction — but Republicans were never asked to disavow any of it. And yet here we are today, with a couple of social liberals and lefties making media posts calling out this ad and a Columbia University professor analyzing it for eugenic language on TikTok. And it’s being spun into a legitimate political problem for Democrats, one that threatens to cost them a chunk of voters. I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be. My hope is that someday we can all recognize this inherent hypocrisy. Anyone who takes a handful of lefty social media posts and spins them into some grand problem with the entire left and the Democratic Party is not working in good faith. We can’t keep pretending that only Democrats have agency to respond and tamp down on their own base — and yet that they are also answerable for every stray comment some vaguely left-coded person makes.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
