President Donald Trump is once again outraged at Amazon, and is once again complaining that the eCommerce giant is using the U.S. Postal Service as its “delivery boy.”
The president than re-raised the possibility of pursuing anti-trust claims against Amazon.
The president’s animus against both the online retailer, its CEO Jeff Bezos and the newspaper he owns (The Washington Post) is longstanding, dating back to the 2016 campaign when Trump first floated the possibility that Amazon should be examined in the context of antitrust regulations.
In the latest round of Twitter attacks this morning, the president claimed The Washington Post has “gone crazy” in its negative coverage of the Trump administration in the last few months. Trump further noted that the paper’s coverage was a form of retaliation after Amazon “lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Shares of Amazon fell nearly 2 percent in early trading before paring some losses.
“… In my opinion the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive (the paper loses a fortune) lobbyist for Amazon. Is it used as protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought?” the president tweeted this morning.
The Supreme Court reference is to the June ruling that determines that states have a right to potentially billions of dollars in taxes from internet sales. Amazon has a physical presence in most states, and thus was already collecting sales taxes in almost every state that has them. The decision by the court left Amazon largely unaffected.
This morning’s tweets follow a barrage of tweets against Amazon in January of this year, when the president said that Amazon’s market dominance was harming other retailers.
The Trump administration has been notably tough on antitrust issues, blocking chip company Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of Qualcomm. The Trump administration was also an avid opponent of AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.
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