“Oligarchy, The Rule of Law, and the Democratic Order”
Trump, Bezos, and the slippery slope of authoritarianism.
In the back and forth the last couple of days over the billionaire owners of the LAT and WaPo preventing their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris, it struck me that the objections were mostly driven by a sense 1) that the papers had a duty to stand up against Donald Trump in the latest Most Crucial Election In The History Of The Republic; 2) that editorial independence should prevail over the wishes of the owners; 3) that the owners are simply feckless cowards kowtowing to Trump; and 4) that this is just the latest example of how billionaires are ruining the country.
While I’m sympathetic to all of these to varying extents, none of the individual arguments dissuade me from my overall reaction of Meh. But the combination of them is indeed problematic.
Let’s focus on WaPo and its majority owner, Jeff Bezos, as more is known. A story fronting the B section of today’s NYT, “Inside The Washington Post’s Decision to Stop Presidential Endorsements,” details the events leading up to the decision to quash the editorial.
The decision by Mr. Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing.
Mr. Bezos has clashed repeatedly with Ms. Harris’s electoral opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, who for years has been openly hostile to him on social media. In 2019, Amazon sued the Trump administration, blaming Mr. Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Bezos for its loss of a $10 billion cloud computing contract.
The businesses Mr. Bezos founded, including Amazon and Blue Origin, his aerospace company, still compete regularly for lucrative government contracts. Blue Origin executives met with Mr. Trump on Friday, and the company has a $3.4 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build a lunar lander.
The rest of the report contains some speculation from staffers, most damning of which is former editor-at-large Robert Kagan (who resigned over the matter) claiming it was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying” with Trump. Ditto former editor Marty Barron’s calling it “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch goes even further in “Billionaire cowards at Washington Post, L.A. Times show what life under a dictator is really like.”
If this looks like the latest saga of open corruption in a nation that’s become a billionaire kleptocracy, it is — but this moment is also so much more than that. America is witnessing the raw power of dictatorship some nine days before voters even decide if that will truly be our future path. The cowardly Bezos can spend billions to erect a manmade projectile that sends him into space, but he’ll never have the cojones of a Katharine Graham. He is obeying fascism in advance, and he is not alone.
[…]
The message here is clear. The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has already taught Trump — in the words of Yale’s [Timothy] Snyder, a leading U.S. expert on fascism — what power can do, and if he prevails in next week’s election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force. What happened at the Post and the L.A. Times was a stunning betrayal of journalism’s moral values, but in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.
But these reversals, coming now and coming from the poisoned heart of American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety-wracked electorate that the core institutions that once saved U.S. democracy under the life-or-death pressures of Watergate — the Supreme Court, Congress, and an aggressive media — have morally imploded into empty shells.
While the hysteria here is understandable, it’s predicated on facts not in evidence: that the owners were in fact currying favor with Trump and/or afraid of reprisals in the event of a second Trump presidency. While plausible there is, at least in Bezos’ case, the matter of his having stood up against Trump multiple times during his presidency, both in terms of backing a rather aggressive editorial and reportorial stance against him (the whole “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motif) as well as on the business front. Indeed, the photo atop this post was borrowed from a June 2017 essay titled “Meet Jeff Bezos: the Amazon billionaire daring to take on Trump and the White House.” See also Chris Cillizza’s February 2019 piece, “Donald Trump’s long and dramatic history with Jeff Bezos.”
A couple of readers pointed me to an essay by Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last, “Bezos, Trump, and the Failure of Democracy,” that brings the multiple threads together in a way that resonates with me.
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
While Last offers no direct evidence that the two events were linked, it strains credulity that they weren’t. Indeed, it’s otherwise quite odd—even by Trump standards—for a presidential candidate to be taking meetings unrelated to getting out swing voters in the final days of what appears to be another nailbiter of an election.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
Again: we have no direct evidence of Bezos’ motives here. But we do know that he bought the Post in August 2013 and that it has endorsed candidates in every election until suddenly announcing that it wouldn’t be doing so this cycle. The explanation proferred by its editor, that it was returning to its pre-1976 stance that newspapers should be neutral, while reasonable (indeed, Bunch acknowledges that he’s made that argument himself in the past), strains credulity given the timing.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
Again: this is conjecture without evidence. But it’s certainly in keeping with Trump’s mindset.
After quoting a Russia expert on the parallels of this situation with 1990s Russia, Last asserts:
The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
[…]
What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.
If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.
The hour is later than we think.
While this sounds histrionic—How can a guy who lost the last election and subsequently been found guilty of multiple felonies in court be an autocrat?—there’s something to it. At the very least, it’s a reminder that the guardrails that protected us from the worst of Trump’s excesses last go around likely won’t be there if there’s another.
Circling back to the issue at hand, though, this all amplifies a point that my friend and co-blogger, Steven Taylor, made early in the conversation: “the notion that billionaires are making all these decisions just adds to the un-democratic nature of the moment.”
As I reflect on it, I don’t think the fact that Bezos and LAT owner Patrick Soon-Shiong are billionaires per se is the problem. The Ochs-Sulzberger families have owned the NYT for a very long time and the Grahams owned WaPo until they sold to Bezos and, by and large, they exercised strong support for press freedoms. While not billionaires, they were certainly rich.
More problematic is that, for Bezos at least, the Post is not even a rounding error in his net worth. During standoffs like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers cases, the Ochs-Sulzbergers and Grahams stood firm because they believed they were protected by the First Amendment and their papers’ reputations were at the core of the family business. For Bezos, the Post is a money-losing sideshow. He’s not about to lose government contracts worth billions for Amazon Web Services or Blue Origin over a little thing like a presidential endorsement.
This is rather ironic in that the best argument for someone like Bezos owning a great newspaper is that he can afford to lose $77 million a year—as WaPo reportedly did last year—indefinitely. He likely couldn’t tell you within $77 million how much he’s got liquid right now.
Still, to the extent he can be intimidated by threats of retaliation in the event of a second Trump presidency, it’s to his core business interests, not his vanity project. It’s likely not good for the country that one of its top two newspapers is owned by someone who sees it that way.
Somewhat off-topic, but not far off. I have a question for you, JJ.
Trump threatens to use the US military against Americans inside the US. This would be an illegal order. Would the US Army comply?
@Michael Reynolds: It would probably be an illegal order and “the Army” would almost certainly not comply but I can’t speak for individual soldiers. The President has rather broad and amorphous powers under the Insurrection Act, as well as implied powers as Commander-in-Chief. I can’t imagine the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or Army Chief of Staff going along with order to go after Trump enemies.
But an angry mob protesting Trump, perhaps somewhat violently? The National Guard, not the active Army, would seem the obvious choice there but it’s not really something we have much in the way of modern-day experience with.
Thank you for this informative piece, James.
I will note that Bezos having stood up to Trump before is not particularly relevant to the current moment. We do things until we don’t anymore.
Plenty of people who once stood up to Senile Don now lick his fascist boots. Including his hand-picked running mate JD Vance, who once thought Trump was “America’s Hitler.”
I’m reminded of this:
https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-ahmaud-arbery-shooting/
Do we know for a fact that a billionaire with defense contracts who interfered directly with fairly mundane and normal operations of a newspaper he owned did so explicitly to curry favor with the presidential candidate who was meeting with said billionaire’s more military holdings? No, but the likelihood is high.
And when it comes on the heels of the LA Times’ billionaire also killing an endorsement…
But,
@Gustopher:
This.
The ability to make reasonable inferences is a key aspect of critical thinking.
In the past admin. left to his own devices, TFG would bluster and throw tantrums and the adults in the room would nod, walk away and ignore his orders or at minimum, water them down. The adults are gone, what are left surrounding TFG, are the true believers, the ones who signed on to his administration because they saw the opportunity to subvert democracy and the rule of law. With TFG they have a cannon that they can point and then they will follow through. TFG will be nothing but the Wizard of Oz.
The problem is they own newspapers as a hobby, or for vanity, or who knows why, but clearly not for a passion for a free press in a free country.
BTW, Bezos could have avoided all his Felon problems by selling the Post.
@James Joyner:
The reality that most of us still understand what “four dead in Ohio” stands for is modern-day enough for this cracker. The government has turned on citizens before, it can happen again.
There’s also a Number 5) that belongs on your list in the first paragraph. The WP editorial people were already working on the endorsement when the order came to cancel it. So it wasn’t some philosophical decision that had nothing to do with the election.
The funny thing is that if Bezos thinks this gesture will somehow please Trump, he doesn’t realize he’s going to have to up his game. I suspect that Bezos thinks in some way he and Trump are equals. LOL. Now if he shows up on stage with Trump doing jumping jacks like Musk did, then Trump might, for a few minutes, be impressed. But I wouldn’t be on it.
James, I don’t think you have quite grasped the scale of wealth involved here. Bezos no longer has “core business interests” — he has literally more wealth than he could ever spend or lose, and that no longer depends on Amazon’s future success. All of his projects, including Amazon, are vanity projects — that’s the only metric left that can matter to him. Which ones he cares about most is a purely psychological question.
@DK:
He still does, but for him it’s a feature. No change there.
@DK:
Another aspect falls under the heading of risk management, where certainty is not possible, on which side do we choose to risk erring. If there is evidence the president, or a major party candidate, is, if not an asset of a hostile foreign power, at least influenced by it. Is “innocent until proven guilty” the right rule to apply? Is it not wise to risk being “prematurely anti-fascist*” rather than being sanguine about the possibility?
Engineering risk is the product of probability and severity. Surely a 5% probability of Trump destroying democracy is in the flashing red corner of the risk matrix.
___
* A phrase used to describe supporters of the Spanish Republic who later fell afoul of HUAC. I’ll add that while I don’t think the history is certain, there seems to be a theory that when King Edward VIII showed pro-German tendencies, Churchill and others conspired to replace him with his brother. If true, an improper, and laudable, act.
@gVOR10: from all that I’ve read about the whole affair, the only conspiracy at hand would have been making such a big stink about Wallis Simpson being divorced to the point that the king had to abdicate if he wanted to be with her.
Their Nazi sympathies were pretty well-known IIRC. Supposedly one of the reasons the Duke after abdication was treated the way he was and cold-shouldered later on in life.
[Edit: Sorry The Q, while I appreciate the heartfelt and introspective nature of what you wrote, let steer clear of any passive (in this case) or active support of direct and physical political violence.
This goes for all commenters.
– Matt]
It’s transactional capitulation:
“Link”
Hello James – your capitalization of the above would indicate you don’t believe this election is “most crucial,” let alone an authoritarian threat to American democracy.
This saddens me, I must say.
Jack Ma Meet Jeff Bezos.
@Scott F.: I capitalize it to highlight that it’s been said of every election in my memory, thus greatly diminishing its utility as a rallying cry. I do think that, in light of January 6 and Trump’s increasingly fascistic rhetoric, this one is more important than the other two Trump elections.
Look, your overall point is good. It doesn’t mean much in terms of his wealth. The timing is deeply suspicious.
However, I know some things about Bezos. I’ve read stuff, I know people that worked for him, and so on. He absolutely, unquestionably knows how much he has liquid right now. Probably down to the nearest hundred thousand. And more precision is probably 5 minutes away.
That’s how he rolls. Also, in his business operations, he gets very angry at employees who try to shine him on and pretend they didn’t make a mistake. If they just say, “well, that’s a mistake, and we’ll have to fix it.” he moves on. Some people find this healthy, others find it humiliating.
WaPo has lost around 200K subscribers, around 8% of its entire subscriber base, over the decision not to endorse, with the number “continuing to rise.”
It might not hurt Bezos, but it is an embarrassing headline.
Report from NPR is that the WP has lost over 200,000 subscribers due to Bezos’s antics. 8% of all subscribers.
We may not be able to punish Bezos financially, but we can certainly register our displeasure. Per NPR
There’s a reasonable argument that we’re hurting the paper which does good reporting. There’s also, I’m afraid, an argument that Bezos hired Lewis to turn the paper right and we’re just helping by motivating staff who wouldn’t want to go along to quit.
For me, personally, I’ve been uncomfortable with WAPO for some time. I’ve commented here that I read WAPO and NYT every morning, then I have to read The Guardian to get the news, so I’ve been dithering over whether to cancel NYT or WAPO. Well, Bezos decided that for me. And Alexandra Petri and Ann Telnaes are about all I’ll miss. Are we to ignore their failure? Or should we apply what little pressure we can? And they have the chance to change my mind.
Money isn’t the only way to hurt Bezos. The man has an ego. He wanted to be one of the cool kids. He wanted respect. Now, he’s been exposed as a corrupt and without principles, craven. He’s also shoved oligarch corruption in the public’s face. Between him and Elon he’s feeding a seething anger at these guys, which gives a little shot in the arm to unions which despise him. BTW, Sprouts is Whole Foods with better prices. Just sayin’.
His fellow oligarchs will not be happy with this. They’ll snicker at him behind his back, and it won’t by any means destroy him, obviously, but he’s not enjoying this.
Unless he’s an idiot he’ll wait a decent interval and then sell the paper. And if Kamala wins he’s going to eat some shit financially. Good luck with government contracts.
@gVOR10:
Reasonable, yes. But it’s not the responsibility of customers to save a business’s employees from the bad decisions and poor leadership of their employer.
All across the world, from the beginning of time, laborers doing good work have faced layoffs or other deleterious consequences downstream of the management’s errors. Washington Post employees are not some super special sacred cow class who should be insulated from such repercussions.
Welcome to the real world outside the Beltway, WaPo.
An hour and a half ago WAPO published a note (gift link) from Jeff Bezos. I found it unconvincing, as did the going on 3,000 commenters so far. He opened with concern trust in media has fallen and his desire to improve it.
To my mind an unfortunate example, as distrust of voting machines is driven almost entirely by GOP propaganda, not by any flaw in modern voting machines. It’s easy to read between Bezos’ lines that he intends to increase trust by telling people what they want to hear, i.e. the FOX business plan.
How bad is this day for the MAGAts? Only poor, dim@alanstorm: has crawled out from under his rock to show up. Despite a whole thread criticizing the depraved billionaire class, old Jack/Drew is hiding. I mean, he must feel the draw of the topic of money, like Gollum and the One Ring, but still he remains in hiding.
People are saying bad things about rich people, Drew. I was hoping you’d tell us how none of this matters because it’s only fascism, not money (precioussss), and say, bwah hah hah, a few times. Is it bingo night at The Villages? Is that the problem?
Bezos has just written a howler of a justification in the Post. So much for none of this bothering him. The comments are fun: about 4000 in 5 minutes, and none buy his bullshit.
@gVOR10:
@Michael Reynolds:
To paraphrase Londo Mollari: Ah, Mr. Lex Bezos, cowardice and lies all in one package. How efficient of you!
@Jay L Gischer: How does Bezos feel about admitting that he made a mistake?
I’m guessing that he doesn’t do it very well. I remember an article that I read where when confronted with comments about problems his employees have working at Amazon, he was shocked because none of the things they were describing have ever happened to him.
@Jen:
As I noted above, it is not possible to hurt Bezos financially in any meaningful way at this point, but he can be embarrassed and/or humiliated. It ain’t about the $$$.
@gVOR10: Wow. The condescension in Bezos op-ed plus the terrible voting machine analogy pushed me to cancel my WaPo subscription. I’ll miss Aaron Blake and Philip Bump in particular but, dang, that was a terrible attempt at replying to his critics. Of course if the decision to spike presidential endorsements had come last year it would have been fine (and maybe good, for the reason Bezos suggests), but after the endorsement was written and just over a week before election (and with Blue Orbit meeting with Trump contemporaneously) it just stinks.
@TheRyGuy:
You can repeat that b.s. as many times as you like but it is absolutely crystal clear that Trump is Putin’s bitch. You know it, I know, the entire population of Russia knows it. And BTW, that also puts Trump in bed with the North Koreans.
@TheRyGuy:
No, you’re lying. 78-year-old Epstein-bestie rapist Trump colluded with Russia and is still colluding.
In 2016, Dementia Donald publicly asked Putin to steal Hillary’s emails. Democrats were then hacked by the Russians later that day. Trump’s scampaign met with Russian operatives in Trump Tower; shortly thereafter, the Republican platform softened Russian sanctions language at Trump’s behest.
Both Steve Bannon via Cambridge Analytica and Trump’s Russian asset campaign chair Paul Manafort — who had previously helped Putin meddle in Ukrainian elections — coordinated data usage with the Russians to help the Kremlin. Manafort now openly admits it.
Treason Trump was impeached for his criminal attempt to withhold weapons from Ukraine; now Trump says he would encourage Putin to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries. America’s Hitler Trump also called Putin’s genocidal and imperialist Ukraine invasion “genius” and “savvy.”
You’re wasting your pushing this lie here, bucko. Putin propaganda works better with your buddies over at Stormfront, Breitbart, and 8chan.
John Norman on the Rule of Law.