Quote of the Day: Trump’s Attacks on Amazon and Jeff Bezos are Personal Retaliation for the Post’s Reporting of His Misdeeds

The reality is that the modern Postal Service has been set up to be a hybrid — part government agency with a mission of universal service, part private enterprise with a mission not to lose money, overseen by an independent regulator whose job is to make sure that the two missions are held in proper balance. Unfortunately, that is a reality that is way too complicated for our president to understand.

This quote comes from an article by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post published April 6, 2018 about the costs and profits of the Postal Service in relation to its contract with Amazon, which is now its biggest package customer.  (Again, this article came to me courtesy of Microsoft’s news aggregation feature and made it unnecessary for me to obtain a subscription to the Post.)

Naturally, both Amazon and the Postal Service feel that they are getting a good deal on their contracts.  The Postal Service uses Amazon to defray the costs associated with its delivery of first class mail, on which the Service has a monopoly and on which they appear to be losing a great deal of money.  Amazon uses the Postal Service to provide a low-cost, seven day a week delivery service that covers every address in the country, no matter how remote.  Both benefit from the arrangement: Amazon saves money, and the Postal Service is provided with volume essential to maintaining its all-encompassing delivery obligation.

Expecting Mr. Trump to understand these subtleties is akin to expecting a cat to speak.  His true motivation for his specious and superficial attacks on Amazon and the Postal Service is related to the fact that the head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos,  also owns the Washington Post.  The Post has been “attacking” Mr. Trump with merciless investigative reporting since before he became a candidate for high office.  Despite the newspaper’s uncovering a wealth of derogatory information, not to mention damning evidence of collusion, corruption, incompetence, conniving, favoritist, anti-democratic behavior and speech, Mr. Trump still managed to manipulate the election process in his favor.  He is now using his bully pulpit to savage Mr. Bezos and his web sales service in addition to claiming that his newspaper’s evidence is “fake news.”

Mr. Trump seems not to realize or not care that his tweets and executive orders are disrupting commerce, the normal activities of government, the stock market, and the lives of people all over the world.  His only motivation appears to be derogation of his enemies and elevation of his friends to high places.  We can only hope that a large enough majority of the American electorate will wake up in time to stop him before he completely perverts American society.

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and MichaelGaida)