The Daily Signal - Sticking With Trump: CEO’s Sign Makes a Big Statement in Small-Town America

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

Anthony Constantino grew up in Amsterdam, New York, at a time when the city was bustling with activity. In the years that followed, however, many of the manufacturing jobs disappeared, leaving its factories empty and its residents without work. Rather than flee upstate New York, Constantino instead co-founded Sticker Mule in 2010. The company makes products ranging from magnets and stickers (hence the name) to buttons and T-shirts. Today, it employs about 1,000 people in the Amsterdam area. And until recently, Sticker Mule was known for its products—not its politics. That changed on the day former President Donald Trump survived an assassin’s bullet. Fed up with the hatred toward Trump, Constantino posted on Sticker Mule’s X account an appeal to “help end the hate.” In that post on the night of July 13, he also declared his support for Trump. "I've been seeing the hate directed at President Trump and his supporters for the last eight years. And I don't like it,” Constantino told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. “When a bullet hit President Trump, I spoke up, and I've been doing everything I can to try to stop the hate.” Since that fateful night in July, Constantino hasn’t slowed down. This week, he unveiled a massive 100-foot-wide sign atop his Amsterdam factory along the Mohawk River. He spoke with The Daily Signal about the sign—and the controversy that ensued—for a special episode of our podcast. Illuminated in white and red letters, the “Vote for Trump” sign nearly landed Constantino in jail for allegedly violating zoning rules and distracting drivers. “As soon as the local Democrat mayor heard about the excitement and the enthusiasm for the sign, he got a restraining order issued against me, blocking me from displaying the sign under threat of jail time,” Constantino explained. “My lawyer said, Anthony, if you show that sign, you're going to end up in jail. I thought they were joking; they were serious.” A judge’s last-minute order spared him. Monday’s celebration proceeded as planned with thousands of onlookers. Constantino’s new political action committee—Sticker PAC—produced a video casting the controversy as a “fight for free speech.” Even if Constantino’s advocacy for Trump displeases some of Sticker Mule’s customers, the CEO isn’t planning to stay silent when it comes to politics. “I'm very proud of my organization for the way they've handled all this and they've endured all this. They stayed focused on doing exciting things for our customers, exciting things for the business,” he said. “Everyone stuck by my side. We haven't lost a single employee." Constantino told The Daily Signal that he remains motivated to stop the political division in America and bring the country together. He believes Trump is the leader who can do it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I built a beautiful sign that said to vote for Trump. And next thing I know, as soon as the local Democrat mayor heard about the excitement and the enthusiasm for the sign, he got a restraining order issued against me, blocking me from displaying the sign under threat of jail time. My lawyer said, Anthony, if you show that sign, you're going to end up in jail. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Saturday, October 12th. I'm your host, Rob Lewy, and we're bringing you a special bonus episode this weekend. You just heard the words of Anthony Constantino of Amsterdam, New York. His business, sticker mule, employs about 1,000 local residents

and made headlines this week for something other than making stickers. Monday night, Constantine unveiled a giant vote-for-Trump sign on his factory. He told me why he did it and what he hopes to accomplish. Here's our interview. Anthony, thanks so much for joining the Daily Signal. Thanks, pleasure to be here. Tell us about the situation there, in upstate New York.

Bring us up to speed on the sign and your decision to get involved. For those people that don't know, I come from a small town called Amsterdam, New York. It used to be a city, but now it's more like a town. He used to be 30,000 or so people. Now it's 15.

When I was a kid, it was packed. We had a vibrant mall. It's now abandoned. We had a vibrant downtown. It's now abandoned. And we had lots of manufacturing buildings that are now abandoned, too. Over the last 14 years or so,

I've been able to bring jobs back, Amsterdam, I created nearly 1,000 jobs in Amsterdam, New York, manufacturing jobs, American manufacturing jobs, GMI Company. Tickermil, which I started 14 years ago. And really, I stayed out of politics. I'm not a particularly political person. In fact, I checked my voter registration reason. I said everyone's got to go to your registered to vote.

And so a friend looked up mine to make sure I'm registered correctly. And you say, Anthony, you're still registered as a Democrat. So I haven't been a particularly political person, but I've been seeing the hate directed at Trump and directed President Trump. and his supporters for the last eight years, and I don't like it. It's not something I like. I've been getting myself in hot water ever since I was a kid defending people on behalf of bullying. If you talk to my friends, this has been going on my whole life.

I always get myself in hot water on behalf of other people. And so I went a bullet hit President Trump in the ear, and people said it's not a big deal with a huge deal. But when a bullet hit President Trump, I spoke up to do, and I've been doing everything I tend to try to stop the hate. And I think one of the best ways to try to stop the division in this country is for people that support Trump to simply admit they like them in a respectful way because far too many people that are poisoned with anti-Trump hate. They haven't even met a Trump supporter. So they don't know there's kind-hearted, nice people with great reputations like myself that support them.

So I've been trying to do what I can to stop the hatred directed at him and directed at supporters just by being a vocal supporter, but doing it in a respectful way. So a beautiful sign that says vote for Trump. artistically designed, locally handcrafted, moved very quickly to get it done, got it on top of my building, excitement built for the sign. And next thing I know, as soon as the local Democrat mayor

heard about the excitement and the enthusiasm for the sign, he got a restraining order issued against me, blocking me from displaying the sign under threat of jail time. My lawyer said, Anthony, if you show that sign, you're going to end up in jail. I thought they were joking.

They were serious. In fact, I even had to get a criminal counsel, to advise me and he said, no, for sure. You're going to be in deep trouble if you show that sign. But so many people were excited, we ended up having a massive event on Monday, and thousands of people showed up to see the sign. I didn't know what was going to happen because the restraining order was still in place as the event was starting.

And just as the event started, my lawyer called me, and he said, Anthony, I got great news for you. We got the judge to vacate the order. They agree with us. The mayor was wrong. He had a phony narrative that the sign, a beautiful sign, the public safety hazard and the judge agreed with us and they vacated the order and I got to go forward with the event and light the sign and I didn't go to jail, although a lot of people

are telling me they wish I went to jail because they think it would have brought even more attention to the sign, which I don't know if that would have been, you know, I don't know if that would have been good or not. One of the things that you just said there at the end is all of the attention, the Democrats and some of the people who've expressed really hateful thoughts toward you, they've managed to generate a lot more attention on the whole. whole sign to begin with. And so one of the things that I'm curious about is going back to July, because your story when it comes to first being very active vocally in support of Trump, as I

understand it, happened on the night of July 13th when Donald Trump faced the Assassin's Bullet and was hit in the ear. You decided to go to social media, express your opinion. You then emailed the massive list that you've accumulated for sticker mule customers. And then that's when people started to say, hey, why is he getting involved in politics? Why is he speaking out? Can you take us back to that moment and just some of the things that motivated you to do that? Sure. The people that know me know I move very quickly.

I run the company on the basis of principles. And number one principle, I got overall corporate principles and there's about 10 of them. Number one is move fast. So I move very quickly. And the other thing that people know me know that I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about making money. I happen to be very good at it, but I tell people all the time, like if you look at the best CEOs in the world, they don't think about making money.

They think about solving problems. Elon thinks about solving problems, Steve Jobs. The best guys don't think about making money. So I don't know where I am in the scheme of things, but I don't think about making money. I think about solving problems, and the hatred towards Trump is a big problem. And once there's bullets flying, it just went too far.

And I said, look, I'm going to do what I can to solve it. Too many people are staying silent on the sideline. And I said, listen, I got some skills maybe and some creativity behind me and maybe I got to do what I can to try to solve it. And I encourage anyone that's concerned about the situation to join me in vocally admitting you support Trump or do it in a friendly, polite way and let people be hateful. Because when people say hateful things, they often regret it. And I think all the people that said the nasty things to me, people told me to kill myself and all sorts of crazy stuff. I think those people probably regret what they said so much. Some of them are going to go out and vote Trump

because they probably realize now I've got a point. This hatred and division needs to end. And a lot of them need to go out and vote Trump. And the other thing I think is really important at the sign is doing it to vote for Trump and people in New York and in blue regions think that their vote doesn't count. It does count because to the extent we get a massive show of support for Trump. The States can all go away.

And I think everybody wants it to go away. It's in the best interest of both sides for it to go away. but it's only going to go away. If everybody votes for Trump, doesn't matter if you're in a blue state or a red state, go out and make your vote be counted because people look at the popular vote. They think about that thing,

and your vote matters. It's going to influence public opinion and make the hate go away. That's for sure. Everyone's vote certainly does matter, and many people are in the process of voting now or the registration deadlines are coming up. It's critically important to do that.

Now, Anthony, you said something there that I want to pick up on because so many of the articles that have come out in just the course of the past week, quote these business experts saying, what a mistake it was on your part to do this and how you're going to potentially alienate customers and why you should just not introduce politics into business. To me, it seems like that's a bit of a double standard. It was many of these same people who just a few years ago were encouraging businesses to lean in

during COVID and following George Floyd's death. And even during the last presidential election, when people came out for Joe Biden, do you feel like you're being held to a different standard than perhaps they were? The first thing is you don't achieve impressive things in life listening to experts, because a lot of times if these experts were so good, they would have done what I did. And most of these experts, they tell me I'm a business expert. You shouldn't have done this. Most of these people haven't done anything similar to what I've done or Elon's done.

He's done a thousand times or a million times more than me, but they haven't done anything, and yet they call themselves experts. So first thing, if you want to do interesting things in life, you've got to go against the grain or you're going to be one of the many. And I've always done what I think makes sense. I don't listen to experts. I listen to myself and people I trust that are my social circle. I take advice from people in my social circle,

but ultimately I make my own decisions. And if you want to get abnormal results, you've got to be willing to do things to other people wouldn't do. And I want to say, beyond this, I'm using my creativity to solve this problem. In a number of ways, we also spun up something called sticker pac.ac.com, where you can go get free. Trump stickers. It's a political action committee that we had to spin up to give away free Trump stickers. Everyone should go there and grab those. And I think by this weekend, we're going to have another

website launch called see the sign.com. F.E.esign.com. And we're going to have a nice website about the sign, commemorating the sign, encouraging people to come from all over the country. To come see the sign, we're going to build a little park in front of the sign. And you're going to be able to come to our nice new park and take pictures in front of the sign and share them on social media. and have fun and show people in a nice memorable way that you support President Trump. Anthony, let's close by talking about the community of Amsterdam. You shared a bit at the beginning of the interview.

I certainly know Amsterdam from traveling between Utica and Albany. Let's a stop on the New York State Thruway. People are probably familiar with the community. Tell us about the location of your factory, where people can see the sign. I understand that some of the critics said that the reason they wanted to block the unveiling was because they thought it would be a distraction to drivers.

So give us a perspective of what you're doing there and how just generally the community has reacted. Believe it or not, I'm not in Amsterdam. I told you had a lot of abandoned factory buildings over the last 14 years. I ended up buying almost every functional factory building. I can never even keep track of the numbers. A few days ago, a few weeks ago, I said I got five.

My friend grabbed me to know Anthony, he got seven or eight. So we got quite a few manufacturing buildings. But the building that this sound sign is on top of it was on top of a building called the Founds Building. It had a sign that said founds on top. And the Founds company was a glove manufacturer that left and went to China. So that old sign that used to be up there was a really disheartening sign that represented American manufacturing leaving and going to China. I put up a new sign that represents its return that represents confidence and outrepresents free speech because of the battle I needed to go to. But yeah, the mayor made an argument that

the signs a public safety hazard. I said very simply, look, people like beautiful signs. They're all over the country and people always like them. People like when we take tribute to historical figures and President Trump's a historic American figure, a historic global figure, and most of all, people know how to drive cars. It's a good thing. My mayor isn't the mayor of Las Vegas or he shut the whole city down. That's a great point. One other question for you about the people of Amsterdam. So you mentioned how it was a big manufacturing community. A lot of those jobs were lost to China and other foreign countries. The people that you employ, What has the reaction been internally in your company in terms of the last couple of months and the attention that this is brought upon Stickermule?

Unlike companies like Netflix and a lot of people in tech where all the donations go to one side and all the employees think in one specific way and they tend to think opposite to the way I think. Stickermule is a company that supports people from all sides. They've got all different cultural backgrounds and political views represented at Stickermil. So obviously coming out and supporting Trump is you could say an interesting thing to do when you got a company with people on all different sides. But I say if you're going to be a leader and you're going to be a good leader, you've got to constantly invest in building goodwill and respect with your people. And so I spent 14 years trying to treat my team as good as I can. I always try to do the right thing. And when you do that, people stay loyal to you and they respect you.

And when you build up that goodwill, they say it's there for you to use when you do something that maybe they disagree with. So I think their overall response to the company has been very impressive. I'm very proud of my organization for the way they've handled all this and they've endured all this. They stayed focused on doing exciting things for our customers, exciting things for the business. And no one, everyone stayed with me, everyone stuck by my side. We haven't lost a single employee. I don't like to pick on these guys, but there's another company called Base Camp that some people remember two years ago. One of the founders wrote a message saying no more political conversation at work and half of his company quit.

I did a much stronger thing saying I support Trump. Everyone was scared to do it. And we lost nobody. Everybody stayed with me. Everybody stayed with my side. Whether they agree or not, because they know the type of person I am, they know I respect everybody, and they know the intentions behind what I'm doing. When we relaunched the Daily Signal in June, we were in need of updating our logo and some of the products.

And we use sticker mule to purchase some car magnets and other products that you make. And I can speak to the high quality work and the good things that you were doing. And again, this was free July, so I had no idea about your political beliefs at that point. But I just want to thank you for doing that and making a high-quality American product. Certainly we need more of it in this country. Cool. Thank you so much. Hopefully, all this effort I'm doing, I've been asking people later.

If you think I'm making a difference, doing everything I'm doing, hopefully I am. Hopefully, I'm showing people, it's a lot less controversial now to stand up and say, you support Trump and hopefully I'm making people on both sides feel a lot better. Both the Trump supporters that have been fearful speaking up, I'm showing them that you can do it and everything's going to be fine. And also the people that don't like Trump, hopefully I'm making them feel better, too, that they can look at me and see me and say, Trump supporters aren't the bad people that we've been led to believe they are by,

politically by political actors, really. Well, Anthony, what's the best way that our listeners can find out more about you or support the work you're doing? Sure. I have been off social, I've been off the radar, but if you want to start following me, I started using the thing called X recently. I'm AC-132. I didn't know if it was the best handle, but now everyone's telling me they like the handle.

So I'm AC 132 on X. I'm also playing around with Instagram, but really the accounts to follow are sticker meal, both on X and Instagram. People love us there. And, of course, come to the website, go to stickmail. com. And everybody should go to cistern. com slash stores and spin up a store. We just launched a stores platform where we got Don Jr. selling, Henry Sehudo, selling,

a guy I really like Ricky Berwick has a store. We launched over 12,000 stores. We're still in beta. That's great. And one last plug, go to sticker P.A. and get your free Trump stickers so you can hand out Trump stickers and show people, tell your friends in a nice way that you like President Trump. Anthony, thanks so much for being with the Daily Signal today.

We'll keep an eye on the work that you're doing. And certainly, next time I'm in upstate New York, I'll make sure to drive by Amsterdam to see the sign. Thanks. Wonderful time talking. I had a wonderful time talking to you today. I really appreciate it. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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