How Jeff Bezos’s Surrender to Trump Freed Him to Dodge Labor Laws

Those drivers in Amazon uniforms who drive Amazon trucks? Amazon says they don’t work for Amazon, and Trump’s NLRB no longer disputes that.

One of the business world’s more nauseating capitulations to President Donald Trump has been that of the world’s third-richest human, Jeff Bezos (net worth: $264 billion). During the 2016 campaign Bezos was a Trump critic, pointing out that “saying that he may lock up his opponent erodes our democracy around the edges.” The newspaper Bezos owned, The Washington Post, broke the damaging story of Trump boasting on videotape that “When you’re a star, they let you do it … grab them by the pussy.” After Trump became president, Bezos said that it was “really dangerous to demonize the media, it’s dangerous to call the media low-lifes, it’s dangerous to say that they’re the enemy of the people.”

Trump retaliated in 2019 by denying Amazon a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon and giving it to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued, arguing this was an act of political retribution, and got the Microsoft award overturned; in 2022 the Biden administration divvied the contract among Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. By then, Bezos had become more circumspect. After the January 6 insurrection, Bezos offered no public condemnation, and in 2024 he barred the Post from endorsing any presidential candidate. That turned out to be a prelude to dumbing down and lurching rightward the paper’s editorial pages, then shrinking the news staff so drastically—all but eliminating once-substantial coverage of foreign affairs, sports, culture, and  the D.C. region—as to remove the Post from the first rank of American newspapers. 

Bezos’s attention had turned elsewhere. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund; created an online Trump merchandise store; paid $40 million to license a puffer documentary about first lady Melania Trump ($28 million of which reportedly went directly to Melania); spent an additional $35 million publicizing the film;........

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