Donald Trump is unhappy with Jeff Bezos, and it now appears that the biggest threat to Amazon isn’t revenue growth and profit margins, it’s a potential future President Trump who may deem AMZN to be anti-competitive and force it to break apart.
In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump went off on the Amazon founder, accusing Bezos of having The Washington Post (which Bezos purchased for $250 million in late 2013) run political hit pieces on Trump, apparently to stop Trump from going after Bezos for having a monopoly.
“Every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder tax wise. He’s using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon the way they should be taxed. He’s worried about me, he thinks I would go after him for anti-trust. He’s got a huge anti-trust problem because he’s controlling so much. Amazon is controlling so much of what they’re doing.”
To be sure, the bad blood between the two is nothing new, and started in 2015 when in response to Trump tweets that “The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon”, Bezos responded with a proplsal to shoot Trump into space.
Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace https://t.co/9OypFoxZk3
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 7, 2015
In this specific case, the Donald’s irritation stems from the fact that The Washington Post is putting together a team that will solely focus on Trump and all aspects of his life. “We’re going to do a book, we’re doing articles about every phase of his life.” said Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. Woodward went on to call Trump’s real estate deals in New York “more complex than the CIA.”
According to Woodward, Bezos has urged the Post to run as many stories as possible about all the presidential candidates so that voters can’t say they were uninformed when they select the next president.
“He said, ‘Look, the job at the Washington Post has to be tell us everything about who the eventual nominee will be in both parties. A 15-part, 16-part series, 20-part series, we want to look at every part of their lives. And we’re never going to get the whole story, of course, but we can get the best attainable.”
While we are in agreement with Woodward in theory, in practice, there is a problem: as the recent Facebook fiasco has once again vividly demonstrated, the mainstream media proves again and again that they will suppress what they feel is unimportant, and flat out leave pieces out of a story in order to protect people they support. Trump will no doubt take this in stride, and presumably grow even stronger from it, as he has with every other botched attempt at getting in the way of a Trump presidency.
Furthermore, by the time the book is done, Trump will either be president or be a political cadaver. At which point we hope Bob Woodward will focus his investigatorial skills on the only person who could be president at the time: Hillary Clinton, who oddly enough, has gotten a blank check from the pro-administration WaPo over the past year…
Here is the full interview
via http://ift.tt/1rJYVi2 Tyler Durden