Scott Galloway Explains How YOU Can Stop Government Overreach Using the Power of Your Purse

Above, Scott Gal­loway and Kara Swish­er explain how every­day Amer­i­cans can push back against gov­ern­ment overreach—by focus­ing on the eco­nom­ic deci­sions they make each day. “Trump does not respond to out­rage. He responds to mar­kets,” says Gal­loway. Ergo, it’s time for an “eco­nom­ic strike,” a “short-term coor­di­nat­ed with­draw­al from spend­ing.” He con­tin­ues: “if wealthy house­holds took their spend­ing down 10% and mid­dle class and low­er income house­holds … took it down 5%, you would take GDP neg­a­tive almost overnight.”

But he also gets more spe­cif­ic than that:  “If you want­ed the fastest blue line path … I believe if you could con­vince Amer­i­ca, the entire econ­o­my now is built on AI… if you could con­vince a bunch of Amer­i­cans to can­cel their Chat­G­PT or Ope­nAI accounts and all of a sud­den Ope­nAI had to announce that their sub­scrip­tions had fall­en off a cliff, that would rip­ple into Nvidia. That would rip­ple into Microsoft. And these are the peo­ple that Trump cares about.”

He goes on to add: “If you could fig­ure out a way to basi­cal­ly kick a small num­ber of com­pa­nies relat­ed to the tech econ­o­my that account for 40% of the S&P right now … if all of a sud­den, if you took all of your mon­ey out of any JP Mor­gan–affil­i­at­ed bank and trans­ferred it to a local region­al bank, if you can­celled all of your stream­ing media plat­forms, if you can­celled Ope­nAI and Anthrop­ic and you said “I am not upgrad­ing my Apple phone,” and there was a real move­ment that reg­is­tered and they had to dis­close it in their earn­ings calls — this would come to an end pron­to.” CEOs would stop bend­ing their knees and sud­den­ly find their voice.

Every dol­lar we spend—or withhold—sends a sig­nal to the mar­ket and to Trump. When enough peo­ple hold back, the pow­er of the purse can do what courts and elect­ed offi­cials can­not. Trump reversed many tar­iffs after mar­kets freaked out on ‘Lib­er­a­tion Day.’ What’s to say it wouldn’t work again?