New Coke and Trumpism

Encyclopedia Britannica tells me today marks the 40th anniversary of New Coke. That story has been ringing in my ears lately, not just as a marketing misstep, but as a parable for what Trump and his cadre of billionaires are doing to this country.

I’ll tell it the way I remember it from when I first heard it over twenty years ago in an Introduction to Marketing class.

Coca-Cola had long been the dominant soft drink in America. But by the 1980s, Pepsi was gaining ground. Coke’s leadership panicked. They ran double-blind taste tests: Pepsi vs. Coke, and Pepsi came out on top. So they did what any rational, MBA-wielding executive might do: they engineered a new formula, scientifically optimized to beat both in taste tests.

They launched it as New Coke. And it bombed.

People didn’t just dislike the product. They rejected it. Coke had erased the thing people actually cared about. Not just a flavor, but a symbol, a memory, a feeling. Within months, the company brought back the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic. The backlash became a case study in marketing textbooks: don’t forget your customers. Don’t forget your identity. You’re not just selling a product—you’re selling meaning, trust, history.

There’s a phrase that captures this perfectly: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. In trying to reinvent itself, Coca-Cola destroyed the very thing people loved.

And that, to me, is where we are in America.

The new class of oligarchs, many of them orbiting Trump, seem convinced that, because China is gaining market share in global influence and industry, the U.S. must throw away everything that defines us. Dismantle public education. Gut environmental protections. Undermine science and academia. Sell off national resources. Crush the public sector. Privatize everything. Strip it all for parts like some venture capital firm in a fire sale.

They think they’re modernizing the country. But really, they’re just pushing New America: a soulless product that betrays everything people actually care about. And when it fails, there may not be a Classic version left to go back to.