With news that casual dining chain Cracker Barrel had pretty much recouped its losses after it abandoned its $100 million rebrand gaffe last year, MS Now regular and political mush mouth Donny Deutsch admitted the obvious: DEI sucks as a business model.
Deutsch joined the July 8 edition of Morning Joe, where he addressed Cracker Barrel stock skyrocketing into orbit. The chain — caused backlash amongst consumers in 2025 for abandoning its traditional ole southern “Uncle Herschel” leaning on a barrel logo for a rebrand that looked like the print for a raggedy carpet you’d plop on your front porch for guests to wipe their feet.
The ad expert waffled around and of course tried to blame President Donald Trump’s comments on the rebrand for Cracker Barrel’s stock option going belly-up: “Cracker Barrel went for kind of a modernization. They changed their logo. They changed their menu items to contemporaries. Donald Trump said something about it, and business went terrible. They dropped by 8%.” The stock has since soared 100 percent on the year.
Very cute, Deutsch. Business sucks? Blame a Trump Truth Social post! It couldn’t possibly just be that customers had enough with self-absorbed lefty C-suite personalities taking beloved brands and yeeting them into the dumpster of sociopolitical experimentation, right? After all, even Deutsch himself pointed out that the Cracker Barrel CEO, Julie Masino, “has since come out and said, ‘You know what? I screwed up. Mea culpa. I kind of got fired by America’ — not literally fired, but — and now she's gone back and put Uncle Herschel's breakfast in. They've gone back to the old location.”
Watching @DonnyDeutsch waffle around admitting DEI sucks for a business model is pretty comical. pic.twitter.com/ZoSprKwRXw
— Joe Vazquez (@JV3MRC) July 9, 2026
Where in the buttermilk pancakes does being “fired by America” imply Trump was liable for a company paying the price for self-inflicted brand suicide?
But don’t expect being forthcoming to be a strong suit for the same guy who flailed in 2023 that the GOP was the “lug nut, nut job party” while in the same vein arguing Democrats’ obsession with spending trillions in tax dollars (e.g. Inflation Reduction Act, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package) made them “the party of competence.”
In 2021, Cracker Barrel launched its “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy,” which “included an effort to 'better identify, recruit and advance strong, racially and ethnically diverse talent,'" according to WMAL. Equally cringe was the company’s move to encourage employees to join one of eight in-house identity groups, including LGBTQ+ Alliance, Hola, and Women's Connect.
Ditching the iconic logo was clearly the last straw for the customer base, and the company was confronted with either depoliticizing their business acumen or risking further market punishment. The leadership chose the former, and the market awarded them for it.
But Deutsch has proven to be too afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome over the years to comment on pretty much anything without shoehorning Orange man bad! into it.
