Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

Fear Lurks Behind Trump's Amazon Vendetta

Tax avoidance doesn't normally faze this president. Institutions that could blunt his power are a different story.

April 3, 2018 at 6:15 PM UTC

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

Oh, that's the problem.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Who'd ever have guessed that the forces driving President Donald Trump's attacks on Amazon.com Inc. are personal animus, fear, politics, and a lifelong obsession with the media?

Trump has spent the last several days using his bully pulpit on Twitter to take pot shots at Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, helping the company's market valuation shed about $75 billion. Trump has claimed that the main reason he hates Amazon is because it gets off easy on taxes, has dislocated traditional retailers and, most curiously, hurts the U.S. Postal Service by giving it lots of business: