Jeff Bezos proved 'richest and most powerful' just 'gave up' against Trump: analyst

Tech billionaire Jeff Bezos intervened to quash the editorial side of The Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Facing criticism, he doubled down in a public statement defending his decision to muzzle the editorial room, claiming that newspaper endorsements are outdated and fuel media distrust.

But all of this signifies something bleaker, wrote Franklin Foer for The Atlantic: It shows the powerful elements of society defending American values in the face of Trump in 2020 are simply laying down for him this time.

"At a certain point, some humans, even the richest and most powerful, simply give up," wrote Foer. "The most graphic illustration of this is Jeff Bezos. In the years after he bought The Washington Post, the Amazon founder seemed to bathe in the praise that his paper received for its coverage of Trump. He paid for glossy Super Bowl ads, blaring the paper’s new motto, 'Democracy dies in darkness.'"

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In doing so, Bezos improved his public image and became "a darling of the Washington elite and a heroic figure in some journalistic circles" — but Trump issued constant regulatory threats against him. This time around, he appears beaten down and willing to knuckle under for the sake of business, wrote Foer.

"After 11 years ... he broke with tradition and suddenly decided that the Post should no longer put its weight behind a presidential candidate. He later supplied a high-minded justification for his meddling, which mostly blamed journalists rather than autocrats for widespread mistrust of the media, but it wasn’t hard to interpret the psychology at play. In his mind, and for the sake of his balance sheet, resistance is no longer worth it," wrote Foer.

"Resistance" that defied Trump for all that time seems to have lost its energy, Foer said.

"On the cusp of Trump’s potential return to power, the Resistance now feels like a relic of another era. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, is not what it once was," he added. "Pollsters privately suspect that this election will have lower turnout than the last."

But maybe it's not quite gone, he concluded, if you look past the echelons of the elite willing to "make peace" with Trump. The negative reaction to Bezos' intervention suggests this.

"According to NPR, 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions to protest Bezos’s decision," wrote Foer. This might weaken the paper's ability to do its core job, he warned — but "in the short run, it’s evidence that a meaningful portion of the electorate is unwilling to sleepwalk into a second Trump term, a hopeful indication that the cloud of apathy might, however belatedly, be lifting."