Here’s an update to the story below on comments 94-year-old Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus made suggesting 80-year-old President Biden was too old for the job. After saying he was “afraid” of at least one thing his likely opponent Donald Trump would do if elected, he has now endorsed Trump. In an op-ed piece in RealClearPolitics, he wrote “[W]e cannot let his brash style be the reason we walk away from his otherwise excellent stewardship of the United States during his first term in office.” Marcus earlier told the New York Post Trump couldn’t keep his mouth shut and he was “struggling” with whether to support him.
Apparently that struggle is over. Here’s the original piece below:
Bernie Marcus may have helped create one of the greatest retailing companies in the history of the business. But these days he keeps saying some of the oddest things.
A year after calling Americans lazy who didn’t want to work anymore, the Home Depot co-founder gave an interview to the New York Post in which he called President Biden a “dunce” who is essentially feeble and senile and the reason for all the country’s problems.
This is not the first time Marcus (pictured, right, above with a second co-founder Arthur Blank on Home Depot’s history on its website), a devout conservative who was one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters – and a huge contributor as well – in the past two elections, has torn into Democrats, liberals and essentially anybody else who had different opinions from his.
What makes this tirade especially caustic is that he accuses Biden of not being competent because of his age: “Somebody is feeding him like a puppet” he told the Post, referring one assumes to policies and decisions not eating his dinner. That Marcus makes this point is particularly ironic: at age 94 he is more than a decade older than the president yet says he – Marcus –has the brain of a 60-year old. One can assume he doesn’t believe the same of Biden.
Marcus said he now has misgivings about Trump and told the Post he is “struggling” with his support for the presumed Republican candidate in next year’s election. “He can’t keep his mouth shut . . . I’m afraid if he’s elected, the first thing he does is go after his enemies, starting with the Republicans.”
Still that’s better than what he thinks will happen if Biden is elected: “If this election goes the way the last one went, this country will be a Third World country.”
Home Depot disassociated itself from its former CEO in 2022 when he said Americans were “too lazy, fat and stupid to work,” blaming socialism, “woke” attitudes and assorted other factors. One can assume they would have the same thing to say about these latest Marcus opinions, trying as they did last time to stifle any boycotts of the retailer that were being suggested then.
Many business leaders on both sides of the political spectrum have made political statements, especially over the past several years when the country has been particularly divisive. What seems to set this one apart is a nonagenarian calling an octogenarian incapable to doing his job because of his age.
One can hardly wait for what Bernie Marcus says next.
WarrensReport 