Jeff Bezos Continues to Remake the Washington Post into his Pro-Trump Dream

Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, famously pulled the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before the election, triggering a wave of backlash that has annihilated his business’s bottom line, losing over a quarter million subscribers since the billionaire intervened in the Post’s coverage, and leading to the resignation of Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan. Just last week, longtime editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after her cartoon depicting Bezos and other billionaires bowing at the feet of Trump was spiked. Bezos has already backtracked on the logic he laid out as to why he killed the Harris endorsement in his op-ed defending his very clearly self-interested decision to play nice with Trump.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.

Endorsements create a perception of non-independence you say? I guess that means that Bezos’s Washington Post has decided that it likes being perceived as non-independent, as the Washington Post Editorial Board is out with an opinion column endorsing most of Trump’s cabinet picks. Everyone Trump has nominated gets the supposed non-endorsing newspaper’s endorsement, save for truly reckless nominations like Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, Project 2025’s Russel Vought for the Office of Budget and Management, and Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence. The other 19 nominees all get the Bezos WaPo seal of approval.

In a normal world, an article like this would be pretty straightforward for a mainstream editorial page to write. Newspapers are populated by people who are definitionally experts in their coverage areas, and a service like this diving into what these people would do with their power could have value. The problem is that it doesn’t explain at all why some of these cabinet nominees should have power, plus I have spent all morning looking and have yet to find another article like this from WaPo’s Editorial Board. I have searched wide and far in the broken Google search, as well as within the WaPo archives, and I even was desperate enough to ask The Washington Post’s incredibly useless new A.I. if it could find another column like this endorsing or not endorsing cabinet picks, but it only seems to know one phrase: “Sorry, we couldn’t generate an answer — this feature is still experimental. See search results below or try another question.”

The closest article I could find in the WaPo archives to this normalization of insane Trump cabinet picks is this piece from August 2020, where it seems like they asked individual opinion writers who they would like to see Biden pick for his cabinet should he win. There is also this article tracking Biden’s cabinet nominees after his victory, but there is nothing like this Trump one that one has the official stamp of approval of the paper itself.

WaPo‘s Editorial Board under Jeff Bezos believes that Trump’s personal attorney and former Amazon lobbyist who tried to help overthrow the election, Pam Bondi, should be confirmed because “Florida’s former attorney general is qualified; lawyers who have worked with her report that she is serious.” The Editorial Board also endorsed Kristi Noem to lead Homeland Security, without even bothering to try to mount an argument as to why, simply stating basic facts, “Dog jokes aside, she has served in Congress and two terms as governor of South Dakota.”

Did Jeff Bezos endorse Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi? Many real journalists at the Washington Post may recoil at that suggestion, but as an outsider, it’s a perfectly reasonable one to ask given the wave of journalists who have left this sinking ship since Bezos so dramatically intervened in its coverage. Jeff Bezos has proven himself to be an untrustworthy person, and the onus is on him to prove that he is not the craven, corrupt wannabe autocrat he has spent the entire century pursuing in his monopolistic thirst to dominate the world with his economic interests.

Billionaires everywhere are enthusiastically bending the knee to Trump, providing more proof of the eternal maxim that capitalists prefer fascists over democracies and thus are enemies of democracy. Billionaires simply are leeches on society, destroying far more value than they create. The Washington Post under Bezos’ pathetic and self-interested leadership is a perfect example, and now journalists like Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Tyler Pager, Josh Dawsey and Leigh Ann Caldwell are leaving the paper as it makes cuts to its business division in the wake of the canceled subscriptions hurting its bottom line, all while Bezos and Amazon give $40 million to Melania Trump to make a propaganda film about her life. It is so transparent what this overgrown manchild is doing to curry favor with the incoming administration who will serve over his vast business interests, and it’s insulting to our collective intelligence for this fundamentally evil and self-interested billionaire to suggest otherwise.

It’s one thing for a journalist to leave a news outlet for another news outlet in pursuit of their own career opportunities, which happens all the time. It’s quite another for a billionaire to intervene so clearly in the paper’s traditional coverage, and then watch a ton of journalists leave for other papers in the wake of it. Jeff Bezos is very obviously remaking the Washington Post to serve his own interests, which align with Trump’s, so it’s natural to assume that is why his newspaper is endorsing Trump’s corrupt cabinet picks with such lazy explanations that don’t even bother to try to mount a real case as to why they’re qualified. I’m sure the Editorial Board will think that is an uncharitable description of their work, but we live in a capitalist system where the capitalists have total control over what they own, and it is a fact at this point that pathetic husks of flesh like Bezos who are more greed than human are immensely excited to get on their knees and lick Trump’s boots, even if it means destroying American institutions like The Washington Post.