Jeff Bezos Enables Trump’s Threat to Democracy: Departing Washington Post Columnist

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “and his cronies” are enabling “the sharpest threat to American democracy” — President-elect Donald Trump — a Washington Post columnist warned Monday as she resigned from the Bezos-owned newspaper.

Columnist Jennifer Rubin is the latest Post Office employee to resign following a series of Trump-friendly moves by mega-billionaire Bezos. Amazon and other Big Tech companies after the November election.

In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Rubin said she felt it was important to publicly call out Bezos, the Post and other media outlets for taking what she characterized as a knee-jerk approach to Trump.

Rubin, who for years identified herself as a conservative, said in 2020 that she no longer considered herself one, arguing that “today there is no conservative movement or party” and that “there is a Republican Party filled with racism and intellectually corrupted by right-wing nationalism”.

Rubin’s scathing criticism on Monday — which aimed ABC AND Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as “corporate-owned cable TV networks” – came after she announced she was co-launching a new media outlet, The Contrarian, on Substack.

She said The Contrarian will “provide fearless and distinctly reported opinion and cultural commentary, without false balance.”

Rubin sharply contrasted her new media outlet with her former employer and other media companies, a number of which she said have “tried to attract Trump-friendly voices.”

“The corporate owners and billionaires of the mainstream media have betrayed the loyalty of their audiences and sabotaged the sacred mission of journalism — to protect, defend and advance democracy,” Rubin said in a statement.

CNBC has sought comment from spokespeople for Bezos and the Post on Rubin’s statement on Monday.

“The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and registered management are among the offenders. They have undermined the core values ​​of The Post’s mission and all of journalism: integrity, courage and independence,” Rubin wrote.

“I cannot justify staying at The Post,” she wrote. “Jeff Bezos and his cronies accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a free and vibrant press is more essential than ever to democracy’s survival and capacity to survive.”

Bezos has been under fire since the fall for moves seen as favoring Trump. They include the killing of a planned Post editorial page endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election, a $1 million donation from Amazon to Trump’s inauguration fund and Bezos visiting Trump at his Mar-a- Lake in Palm Beach, Florida.

On the day news broke that the Post’s endorsement had been killed, Trump met in Austin, Texas, with executives from Bezos-owned space exploration company Blue Origin, including CEO David Limp.

“None of us could have imagined it [former Post publisher] Katharine Graham sends LBJ or Nixon a $1 million check,” Rubin said in her statement, referring to former presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Trump during his first term in office sharply criticized Bezos, online retail giant Amazon and the Post. In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump had used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy” – Bezos.

One of Rubin’s colleagues, former Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, recently resigned from the paper after she refused to run a cartoon of hers depicting Bezos, Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong praying for Trump as president. the chosen ones rose above them.

The cartoon also featured Mickey Mouse, the mascot of the Walt Disney Company. Disney owns ABC News and recently agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit from Trump by saying it would donate $15 million to a presidential foundation and his museum.

Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, had killed a planned endorsement of Harris by the LA Times.

Meta and Altman are also donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Rubin told CNBC that the number of billionaires donating to Trump after being the target of his criticism was staggering.

“When the billions are enough [of dollars] enough billions?” asked Ruby. “I was under the impression that these people were in the best position to resist authoritarianism, and it turns out that they were the quickest to fall in line.”

“I think they have financial interests that are very dependent on the government,” she said. “For all the talk of Silicon Valley independence, it depends in large part on government bigotry.”

“They didn’t become billionaires by thinking of others,” Rubin said.