The once frosty relationship between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos has been warming up lately, due in large part to the Amazon founder’s apparent newfound willingness to lick the president’s boots and the president’s longstanding affection for bootlickers.
But Tuesday offered a brief window into their old feud after Punchbowl News reported that Amazon planned to display the cost of tariffs next to product prices on its website. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she’d talked to the president about the report and called the move “hostile and political.” She accused Amazon of partnering with a “Chinese propaganda arm,” referencing a 2021 Reuters report about Amazon removing reviews on President Xi Jinping‘s speeches and writing.
The two billionaires appear to have quickly hashed it out over a phone call after a reportedly “pissed” Trump called Bezos. And Amazon released a statement saying it had only ever considered the tariff feature—which it didn’t go forward with—for its low-cost store.
After the ordeal, Trump had only good things to say about Bezos. “He was terrific,” Trump told reporters. “He solved a problem very quickly, and he did the right thing, and he’s a good guy.”
The brief lover’s quarrel was a bit of déjà vu from Trump’s first term in office. But the speedy resolution is an indicator of just how much has changed since then. Here’s a look back at how the relationship between Trump and Bezos has turned from sour to sweet.
#SendDonaldtoSpace
The spat between Trump and Bezos dates back to at least 2015, when Trump was still running for the Republican presidential nomination, and tweets were still 140 characters. It was around that time that Trump began trolling Bezos, accusing him of using the Washington Post as a “tax shelter” for Amazon. “The @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives owner @JeffBezos power to screw public on low taxation of @Amazon!” Trump wrote, likely in retaliation for the Post’s critical coverage of his campaign.
Bezos, who was still willing to stand up for that coverage, quickly clapped back: “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace,” Bezos wrote, along with a link to a video of his space company’s recent rocket landing.
“We Can’t Let Him Get Away with it.”
The Trump-Bezos dynamic was hardly any chummier once Trump clinched the nomination, and began calling for antitrust scrutiny into Bezos’s businesses. In an interview with Sean Hannity in May 2016, Trump accused Bezos of “getting away with murder tax-wise.” He argued Bezos was using the Post “as a tool for political power against me and against other people” and said, “We can’t let him get away with it.”
The Post’s then executive editor, Martin Baron, stood up for the paper’s editorial independence from Bezos, saying at the time that he had “received no instructions from Jeff Bezos regarding our coverage of the presidential campaign—or, for that matter, any other subject.”
Bezos backed that sentiment in his own interview with Baron, also in May 2016, saying that Trump’s ranting against the Post was “not an appropriate way for a presidential candidate to behave.” “We want a society where any of us, any individual or institution, if they choose to, can scrutinize, examine and criticize an elected official, especially a candidate for the highest office in the most powerful country on Earth. It’s critical,” he said. “What would be shocking and disturbing is if you weren’t doing that.” Shocking and disturbing, indeed!
The Battle of the Postal Service
Bezos extended an olive branch to Trump after the 2016 election, saying he would give the new president his “most open mind.” But Trump wasn’t interested in making nice and continued to hammer on about Amazon’s alleged tax evasion on Twitter. Those attacks escalated when Trump began laying pressure on the US Postal Service to raise shipping rates on Amazon, causing its stock price to slide.
