It’s been an eventful year since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Adam O’Neal for the prestigious job of Post Opinions editor. O’Neal was an unusual hire, a 33-year-old with little by way of managerial experience. But O’Neal had a redeeming quality: He was ready to shill for Bezos, and the man Bezos has been desperately wooing, President Donald Trump.

It’s remarkable how far Bezos has come since 2013, when he said he purchased the Post from the Graham family out of a sense of civic duty.

Bezos was still singing a similar tune nearly midway through Trump’s first term, telling Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner (4/28/18), “I would be humiliated to interfere” with the Post’s coverage. “I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red… It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”

But days before the 2024 election, with Trump looking like he might return to the White House, Bezos apparently got over his queasiness and personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). “Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos,” The Wall Street Journal (7/2/26) reported.

It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.

Bezos followed up by declaring that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets,” while “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Coming a month into Trump’s second term, this came across as another gift to the president (FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

‘Unapologetically Patriotic’

To lead the newly oriented Opinions page, Bezos tapped O’Neal, who had been a correspondent for The Economist, editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, and executive editor at the conservative Dispatch for just one year.

In that last role—apparently O’Neal’s only newsroom managerial experience—he quickly alienated the Dispatch staff. “He was a competent editor who had no idea how to talk to another human being,” a former associate of O’Neal’s told Status (7/18/25):

He was tough on reporters, sure, but that’s common in newsrooms. He just couldn’t express even the most minor thing without being abrasive, hostile, or raising his voice.

After being named to his post in June 2025, O’Neal declared that Post Opinions would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “communicate with optimism about this country.” This echoed Bezos, who declared a month into Trump’s second term, “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.” Bezos was, of course, echoing Trump’s “America first” rhetoric.

O’Neal has demonstrated his patriotism by overseeing an editorial page that has backed Trump in destroying the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25), kidnapping the Venezuelan president (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26), militarily taking over DC (8/11/25; FAIR.org, 8/14/25), and unprecedented gerrymandering (8/20/25). (When Democrats responded in kind, the Post decried the “power grab”—4/21/26).

The Post’s pro-Trump boosterism under O’Neal has been so over the top, wrote Chris Lehmann (The Nation, 2/4/26), it’d “be a stretch for Pravda to pull off.”

“I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes,” a current Post staffer told Status (5/10/26). “I can’t tell if some of these arguments are being made in good faith or not. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”

‘Being Reconciled Is Not Enough’

While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants (FAIR.org, 1/7/25)—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation.

Shipley had voiced concern over the direction Bezos was taking the Post, warning the billionaire that spiking the Harris endorsement days before the election and yanking Opinions rightward could turn off subscribers. “I don’t care,” Bezos replied (New York Times, 3/14/26). (Shipley proved correct; Bezos’ interventions led to over 375,000 Post readers canceling their subscriptions—NPR, 1/30/26.)

Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”

Seeing the writing on the wall, many of the Post’s centrist and left-of-center columnists took the generous buyouts on offer (which some had been contemplating since before O’Neal was hired). Gone in quick succession were Perry Bacon Jr., Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, Joe Davidson, Marc Fisher, Glenn Kessler, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson, Eduardo Porter, and others. “It’s just an absolute exodus,” a Post staffer told Politico (7/28/25).

The paper’s last full-time Black Opinions columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired in September 2025 (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; FAIR.org, 9/23/25). (Theodore R. Johnson of New America writes roughly once a week as a contributing columnist, but is not on staff.)

Bezos hollowed the Post out further in February when he laid off nearly half of the newsroom, in what “may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation” (Washingtonian, 2/9/26).

Publicly, Bezos claimed he was doing this for the long-term viability of the paper. To be relevant, the Post has to be a “profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin (CNBC, 5/20/26). Otherwise, “it would be like poetry without rhyming.”

Privately, however, Bezos told Trump that Post employees “are terrible…. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book Regime Change.

To make the Post more like his other companies, Bezos needed “hell yes” management, like Adam O’Neal (and former publisher Will Lewis).

O’Neal, in turn, needed fellow travelers, and seems to have hired exclusively MAGA-friendly columnists. According to media critic Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 5/22/26), the Post

purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches [and] tedious anti-woke screeds.

‘A Whole Bunch of Incredible Miracles’

O’Neal’s fealty to Bezos is most blatant in Opinions’ approach to artificial intelligence.

“All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” Bezos told the Financial Times (6/11/26). “We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI,” he continued, sounding every bit the snake oil salesman. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”

And Bezos is banking on these miracles to expand his empire on Earth and in space. Despite being worth a quarter-trillion dollars, Bezos is presently scouring the globe to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy companies in industrial sectors and improve them using AI (Forbes, 3/19/26). Bezos’ latest effort aligns neatly with his new role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a low-profile AI company that’s raised $18 billion in funding (Morning Brew, 6/12/26).

Meanwhile, Amazon—the company Bezos founded, where he remains the largest shareholder and executive chair—“recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive bets on artificial........

© Common Dreams