Jeff Bezos offered to strap Donald Trump, then a presidential hopeful, to a rocket and blast him into orbit. “I have a rocket company,” he joked at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, referring to Blue Origin. “So the capability is there.” Likewise, the president has made no secret of his dislike for Bezos’s company, one of his favorite Twitter punching bags, which he claimed in August was “doing great damage to tax paying retailers.” So, with Congress tied in knots over Facebook’s latest user-data fiasco—C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to testify in the wake of news that data from tens of millions of users was pilfered by Cambridge Analytica—Trump has opted instead to focus his fire on Amazon.
Per a new report from Axios, the president couldn’t care less about Zuckerberg, but is beside himself over free one-day shipping. “He’s obsessed with Amazon,” a source said. “Obsessed.”
His enmity toward the company is apparently based on conversations with his business and real-estate friends, who tell him Amazon is wreaking havoc on their businesses and jeopardizing brick-and-mortar stores.
He’s similarly obsessed with the idea that Amazon is taking advantage of the U.S. Postal Service—“Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” he tweeted in December—and has reportedly continued to belabor the point behind the scenes. Amazon has actually spurred some cities to add U.S.P.S. delivery on Sundays to keep up with demand, but Trump apparently employs selective hearing where the issue is concerned: “It’s been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon,” one source told Axios.
vanityfair.com
