Transcript: Jeff Bezos’ Vile Suck-Up Moment with Trump Is Very Ominous

Bunch: You’re right, Greg. It was an extraordinarily fawning tweet coming from a man who … Obviously, first and foremost, he’s the founder of Amazon and that’s where his wealth comes from. But he’s the owner of The Washington Post, and he knows with the Post comes this watchdog responsibility to cover the new administration fairly. It’s something he’s aware of. He talked about it when he bought the paper back in 2013. You can question the wisdom of sending any tweet at all, but this just sounded so over-the-top.

And it’s fascinating because it comes in the wake of a big controversy, as probably lot of your listeners know about: The Post has been generally making endorsements in presidential races since Watergate, since 1976, and the editorial staff had prepared an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. They’d worked on it for a long time. At the last minute, Jeff Bezos told them not to publish it, [saying] that Hey, we decided we’re going to get out of the endorsement business. The timing raised a lot of eyebrows, but especially because, as it turns out, Amazon, the main source of his wealth, does a lot of business with the federal government. You wouldn’t necessarily think so, but they’re in the cloud computing business, and they have a large cloud computing business contract with [the federal government], among other things.

Jeff Bezos also, like his fellow billionaire Elon Musk, has this space venture called Blue Origin. It actually came out, and it may have been a coincidence–it probably was—but on the very day that Bezos told his editors not to publish the endorsement, some of these executives from Blue Origin actually met Trump at an event down in Austin, Texas.