Virginia Postrel, Columnist

The Real Reason Jeff Bezos Grinds Trump's Gears

He’s the opposite of Trump in nearly every dimension.

August 18, 2017 at 11:00 AM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Bully pulp.
Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images, left; Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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As if he weren’t in enough trouble already, President Trump took to Twitter Wednesday to attack America’s most trusted brand: “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!”

Why would a supposedly jobs-obsessed president denounce a company that’s in the midst of a giant hiring spree — with many of those jobs going to workers (and men!) without college degrees? If he wants to condemn a leading U.S. company, why not pick on Google, which is fast becoming a conservative symbol of politically correct intolerance? That at least would be popular with his base.