Anthony Constantino believes publicly backing Donald Trump cost his company tens of millions of dollars.
In fact, the founder and CEO of Sticker Mule told me an internal audit showed his custom printing company, based in Upstate New York, lost as much as $50 million in revenue after he endorsed Trump in 2024.
But rather than be cowed by the backlash, it pushed Constantino to fight back harder.
“This situation in America is never going to get better if somebody doesn’t power through on this and just not back down,” he said.
Now the 43-year-old CEO is headed to the general election after clinching the Republican primary in the 21st Congressional District, which will be vacated by Elise Stefanik — and he is self-funding his entire multimillion-dollar campaign.
“I want to be self-funding to be an independent-minded person … able to do everything that’s right,” Constantino explained of the decision to shell out millions on the congressional bid.
That self-financing has allowed him to focus on the topics he cares most about — namely, reshoring American manufacturing.
While Constantino is embracing politics now, that was never the plan.
In 2016 he bought MAGA Christmas ornaments for his mother’s elderly neighbors in Florida. Because the purchase was treated as a campaign donation, a left-wing influencer publicized it. Sticker Mule became, in Constantino’s telling, one of the first companies to face a full-scale cancellation over Trump support.
“Tens of thousands of Democrats were writing us hate mail,” he recalled. “We just woke up one day, and it was like all hell broke loose … You never had a day where 10,000 people tell you they hate you, they’re going to destroy your company.”
That experience made Constantino more invested in speaking up; after the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump, he felt compelled to be more assertive — and sent an email to his company’s mailing list, endorsing the former president.
“Donald Trump got shot. And at that point, I just said, like, ‘All right, you know, enough’s enough,’” Constantino explained. “That experience … really woke me up to how bad the left has become.
“I’ve been scared to tell people that I was a Trump supporter. But 1787006765 I want people to know I am a Trump supporter,” he said. “And nobody should be scared to say that.”
Constantino claimed his company lost roughly 250,000 customers after the endorsement. The backlash also damaged the company’s advertising efficiency.
“We took a major hit in search,” Constantino said.
After all that, he felt like he had nothing else to lose. When he learned that the North Country seat long held by Elise Stefanik would be open, he decided to act.
Constantino believes his business — which produces custom stickers, labels, packaging, apparel and other products from facilities in New York — can serve as a blueprint for manufacturing domestically.
Raised in the Rust Belt, he has watched as factories have been hollowed out across upstate New York.
“I grew up in a manufacturing town … I saw manufacturers getting destroyed my whole life,” he said. “My whole town is covered in empty buildings [that] used to be great factories.”
Sticker Mule, he said, was built as a response to that decline.
“The customer really wants a high quality product that’s made locally and shipped to them quickly,” he said. “But the distribution layer is like, let’s go to China, right? Because that’s cheaper.”
He believes the answer is to start building again — for American manufacturers to improve their processes until domestic production becomes faster, cheaper and better.
“We have to start innovating again in the manufacturing space,” he said. “All of our brain power in America in the last 10 to 20 years … went to software. You can innovate in software, but you can innovate in hardware too … In order to bring manufacturing back to America, you have to design your own machines.”
Constantino also pushes back on one of the central fears about automation: that it kills jobs.r
“I’m constantly automating. But my growth was so good that I could automate and grow employment and raise wages at the same time,” he said.