One big fat bribe sums up the moral squalor of Trump's pet billionaires

I haven’t seen it. I hope you don’t, either.

This, from one of the kinder reviews:

“Across some 104 minutes, the first lady delivers these blatantly scripted and meaningless narrations with all the conviction of someone who just woke up from a two-hour nap and can’t remember what day it is.”

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times sees a “glossy, curiously impersonal” portrait of a woman who “rarely drops her Sphinxlike deadpan.” Nick Hilton of The Independent calls the first lady a “scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.” Guardian critic Xan Brooks says it “doesn’t have a single redeeming quality” and compares it to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”

Not since The Washington Post music critic Paul Hume observed that Margaret Truman’s singing voice in Constitution Hall in 1950 was “flat a good deal of the time” has a performance by a member of a sitting president’s family generated such averse reviews.

Yet because the TheWashington Post is now owned by the man who spent $75 million on the movie ($40 million to make it, $35 million to promote it), I somehow doubt The Post will crap on it. (At least Monica Hesse, in her review for The Post, had the honesty to confess that “if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president, which was bankrolled by the company owned by the man who also pays my salary — NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron?”)

My purpose today is less to highlight this inane excuse for a film than to talk about its real excuse — allowing Jeff Bezos to give a big fat bribe to the president of the United States.

Why would Bezos bribe him? Please.

Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, owns Amazon and many other businesses that depend on the whims of the sociopath in the Oval Office. (Trump sold the idea of the documentary to Bezos when he dined at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024, just after the election, according to the The Wall Street Journal.)

Bezos’s Amazon Web Services has a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration for cloud services, which presumably Bezos would like renewed. His rocket company, Blue Origin, has over $2.3 billion in contracts from the U.S. Space Force.

Several of Bezos’s companies are subject to potential tariffs on goods from China. Amazon is under the cloud of a major antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (when the FTC was still independent — before it came under the putative control of the Oval Office). The trial is expected in 2027.

And so on.

Friends, when the history of this sordid period of America is written — assuming it’s not written by historians trying to curry favor with a future fascist regime — I hope the leaders of American business are condemned to the hellfire they deserve for helping destroy American democracy.

The outer ring of hell will be reserved for CEOs who stayed silent so as not to rile the narcissist-in-chief.

Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase will reside here because, notwithstanding his assumed role as spokesman for American business, Dimon has uttered no criticism of Trump other than to suggest, in the vaguest possible terms, that Trump’s attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence “is probably not a great idea.”

The middle ring will be reserved for business leaders who surrendered to Trump’s extortionist demands for personal payoffs.

The Ellisons, père Larry (the world’s third-richest person) et fils David, will be there, along with Shari Redstone and the board of Paramount, for paying Trump $16 million to settle his utterly baseless lawsuit against CBS.

Also in this middle ring will be Bob Iger, CEO of Disney (which owns ABC) and Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, for giving Trump $15 million to settle his equally spurious lawsuit against ABC News.

In the inner ring, where hell fires burn especially hot, will be business leaders who went beyond acquiescing to Trump’s extortion and decided to pay him big fat bribes.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will have pride of place here, after spending a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will get a spot here for lavishing on Trump a custom-designed glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base.

We’ll also find here the CEOs who coughed up $300,000 each for Trump’s ballroom — including crypto magnates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, oil tycoon Harold Hamm, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and every Big Tech mogul.

But Bezos, with his $75 million bribe of Trump, will deserve a special place in the innermost ring of hell.

The $40 million he paid Melania Trump’s production company is at least $35 million more than the cost of typical high-end documentaries. (By way of comparison, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films produced “RBG,” a documentary about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for around $1 million.)

Melania Trump pocketed more than 70 percent of that $40 million — or more than $28 million — the Journal reported.

The additional $35 million Bezos shelled out for marketing “Melania” is 10 times what other high-profile documentaries spend on marketing. The promotional budget for “RBG” was about $3 million. (To be sure, Melania Trump is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I suppose you might argue that Melania needed a larger promo budget. But this much larger?)

All this, at a time when Bezos is slashing the newsroom at the Post — it’s heart and soul — in order to “economize.” Forget the inner ring. Bezos deserves to be at the center of the inferno.

The promo money apparently worked, at least in the U.S., where opening-weekend ticket sales for “Melania” totaled $7 million.

But let’s be realistic. A $35 million promotional budget will get people into theaters to see paint drying.

If all goes well — given that opening weekend is usually about 25 percent of total box office and that movie houses pocket half — Amazon could end up with about $14 million on its $75 million investment. A pittance.

Yet this was never a financial investment. It was an investment in kissing Trump’s derriere. As Ted Hope, who was instrumental in starting Amazon’s film division, wondered aloud to The New York Times: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”

Of course it’s an outright bribe.

If America still had a Department of Justice, Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions. Penalty: imprisonment for up to 15 years.

(Also note: The U.S. Constitution lists taking a bribe as an impeachable offense for a president.)

There’s a statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of such bribes: Prosecution must begin within five years of the deed.

So, my friends, if America gets a true Justice Department starting in January of 2029, Bezos’s inferno may become a reality.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org