Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos licked Donald Trump’s boots Wednesday morning as he congratulated the president-elect on his win.
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote on X. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing [Donald Trump] all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
Bezos’ fawning congrats comes after he stopped The Washington Post’s editorial board from endorsing in the election, claiming that the Post needed to stay neutral in the race in order to fix the distrust in media organizations.
“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias,” Bezos wrote in an op-ed in the paper, while more than 250,000 people canceled their subscriptions in protest of his decision. “A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
People who canceled their subscriptions following his decision accused Bezos of preemptively bending the knee to a wannabe authoritarian in order to protect his businesses from being targeted in a second Trump term. When Trump was in office the first go-round, he threatened Amazon’s tax status because he was angry at Bezos.
“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up,” Bezos wrote in defense of his decision to block the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, an endorsement it had already written.
Yet less than 24 hours after Trump’s victory, following his lie-filled, dark and misogynistic campaign, Bezos heaped praise on Trump and his “extraordinary political comeback.”
The Amazon founder’s post gives the perception that he is not, indeed, independent, as well as proves his critics right that his endorsement decision was a self-interested one.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote in a post on X after Bezos’ original decision. “[Trump] will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner [Bezos] (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Ultimately, the media’s inability, or flat-out refusal, to treat Trump as the danger he is is partly why we are in the position we are in today.
It turns out, democracy does die in darkness.
