Jeff Bezos Smothers Democracy With Cash-Stuffed Pillow In Broad Daylight

Pity the poor billionaire

The Washington Post announced Friday that it wasn’t endorsing a presidential candidate this year, for the first time in decades, even though the Republican nominee Donald Trump is openly hostile to the free press (he has little respect for the Constitution, but he especially dislikes the First Amendment).

Post publisher CEO William Lewis described this abdication of duty as a return to the paper’s roots. Lewis noted that The Post hadn’t endorsed a candidate until 1976, when it endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time.” Carter’s opponent was incumbent President Gerald Ford, who you might recall from those Saturday Night Live sketches. The worst thing he did was pardon Richard Nixon. He never privately crushed on Adolf Hitler.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

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Trump Wishes He Were Hitler Because He Didn’t Watch The End Of The Movie

Despite Lewis’s real nice declaration, it turns out that The Post’s non-endorsement is less a display of Switzerland-like neutrality but more Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement. The Post editorial page staff had drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, but Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos prevented its publication. No, Bezos isn’t a Trump supporter. He’s just a coward.

Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and opinion editor-at-large who resigned in disgust on Friday, told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.”

Trump frequently attacked The Post and Bezos in particular during his first reign of terror. In 2019, Amazon was set to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon, but reportedly Trump ordered Defense Secretary James Mattis to deny the contract and “screw Amazon.” Trump is a gangster and that’s what gangsters do.

$10 billion is serious money, and not even your most bored Amazon Prime spending sprees can make up the difference. Amazon has other lucrative government contracts to consider, as well, and on Friday, Trump met with executives from Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin. We can assume Trump’s motivations were less than pure.

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine defended the decision not to endorse presidential candidates. He wrote, “The Post’s argument is that it is adopting a policy of abstaining from endorsements in presidential races. I believe that policy is, in the abstract, correct. Endorsements in local races make a huge difference because readers have often paid little attention and need an authoritative recommendation. People who read newspapers like The Post don’t need suggestions like this.”

I disagree. If a newspaper has an opinion on the local city council, it should share its opinion about the presidency, especially in this instance where one of the candidates is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and wannabe fascist. It’s worth a few column inches to declare that candidate unfit for higher office or even close proximity on public transportation.

However, Chait recognizes that the “process by which The Post arrived at this decision stinks to high heaven.” It’s clearly intended not to offend Trump and thus functions like preemptive surrender to a fascist. Of course, if the owner of a news outlet fears that a presidential candidate would retaliate against him personally that is all the more reason to publicly endorse his opponent.

Trump hates the free press almost as much as he loathes democracy. He has openly threatened to shake down news outlets that don’t cover him fairly. Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair reported in 2018 that Trump would wonder aloud how he could “fuck” Bezos over because of The Post’s coverage.

“Every hour, we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions,” he ranted at one point, “And I will tell you: This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, taxwise. He’s using The Washington Post for power.”

The Post’s endorsements of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 harshly condemned Trump. The Harris endorsement likely would’ve done the same. Of course, Bezos wimping out won’t spare him Trump’s wrath, just delay it if he wins and governs like some Nouveaux Putin.

The Post wasn’t the only billionaire-owned news outlet that surrendered to Trump. L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shion blocked a Harris endorsement from the Editorial Board. He claimed on social media that instead of an actual endorsement, he wanted the Editorial Board to provide the pros and cons for each candidate, like Ross trying to determine whether he should date Rachel in that Season Two episode of Friends.

The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.

Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nik added to the family self-inflicted humiliation’s when she posted on social media, “I trust the Editorial Board’s judgment. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.” Presumably, that’s a reference to Harris’s position on the Israel/Hamas war, and it’s as shortsighted as The Nation interns who objected to the staff’s Harris endorsement.

Trump is objectively worse on Gaza. He’d easily support actual genocide, not the hyperbole version. He’s also terrible on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, the economy, the rule of law, and democracy in general. If you insist on seeing Harris/Trump as some complex moral trolley problem, you should still make the choice that hurts the fewest people.

Here’s what we’ve learned: Billionaires shouldn’t run newspapers and there’s no amount of money that will make them feel comfortable enough to do the right thing. Appalled readers are now speaking the language billionaires understand best and have cancelled their subscriptions to The Post and L.A. Times. Media bigwigs have argued this is the wrong move because it’ll punish rank-and-file employees at those publications. Of course, The Post started hemorrhaging staff immediately after Bezos’s cowardly decision. (You can pick up a paid subscription to this newsletter here at a discount.)

Bezos could sell The Post to someone who’d make better choices and the hard-working editorial staff could keep their jobs. Or pro-democracy readers could invest in other publications, and The Post reporters could go work there. Bezos doesn’t physically own his employees, even if Trump openly fantasizes about an 19th Century economy.

Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote on Sunday that he’s not leaving yet: “If this turns out to be the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity — if journalists are ordered to pull their punches, called off sensitive stories or fired for doing their jobs — my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse.”

Bezos’s current net worth is $204 billion. He can afford to stand up to Donald Trump, especially considering that we’ll all have greater problems if he’s re-elected. Nonetheless, Bezos is behaving like that other billionaire C. Montgomery Burns, who wistfully confessed that he’d trade his entire fortune … for a little more.