The Walt Disney Company has reported one of the worst drops in popularity since 2020, validating criticism long voiced by President Trump.
According to Breitbart, the drop in visitors to the iconic theme park was seen in a Google Trends analysis, which calculates the number of times a topic is searched and compares this year’s trends to previous totals. The study shows that more than half of the Disney Parks have experienced a significant decline in online search popularity.
Magic Kingdom (Walt Disney World) in Orlando, Florida, saw a 21 percent fall in search queries, while Disneyland in Anaheim, California, saw a 26 percent decline. The worst-performing was Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park, with a massive 51 percent drop in search queries. While some may argue that online queries don’t paint the whole picture, Orlando’s Walt Disney World attendance numbers back up the analysis. Breitbert reported that in September, the park had experienced its quietest period since the 2020 pandemic.
This drop is primarily due to the high costs of visiting theme parks and the increasingly woke policies that have pushed many away. Since 2020, Josh D’Amaro has spent a lot of time changing policies to be “more inclusive.” The phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” was removed, and the company spent millions retooling the Splash Mountain and Jungle Cruise rides after the left felt the rides were “racist.”
Since then, many loyal visitors of the parks have felt the opposite of inclusion and instead feel the policies have alienated them, including on the online platforms. Fox Business reported that in the final quarter of 2024, the streaming platform Disney+ lost 700,000 users due to the company’s “woke political agenda.”
The company was even sued by America First Legal in March 2024 for “damage to Disney’s brand, properties, and commercial reputation by management’s manufactured misalignment between its woke political and social agenda and the vast majority of the Company’s customers.”
Despite only starting to move away from its woke policies with the drop of two DEI programs this year, it appears the company is now facing the costly consequences of pushing the woke agenda where it has no business being.