Since announcing in December that he would step down as Starbucks chief executive, there has been speculation that Howard Schultz is eyeing a run for president in 2020. A couple weeks back, I pegged him as the businessperson most likely to win the Democratic nomination.
Well, Howard Schultz sure sounds like a candidate.
Schultz spoke with The Washington Post at a job fair for young people on Wednesday, and while he insisted he wasn’t talking politics, it wasn’t difficult imagine him delivering the same words in a stump speech in Des Moines.
“The worst thing that we all, whether we be businesspeople or private citizens — we should not be embracing indifference right now,” Schultz said at the 100,000 Opportunities Initiative. “We have to be engaged, we’ve got to speak out, we’ve got to be involved, we gotta stand up for the things that we know are true. And I think the country, in many ways, is in need of a moral, a cultural and an economic transformation.”
Schultz drew attention in March for attacking President Trump, calling him “a president that is creating episodic chaos every day.” He said that Trump’s behavior was “no doubt affecting consumer behavior.”