Trump is reportedly 'obsessed' with bringing down Amazon's Jeff Bezos

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 3 April 2018

He hasn't come up with a nickname for him yet á la Little Marco or Lyin' Ted Cruz, but President Trump definitely has it out for Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, several people close to Trump told Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman.

In recent days, Trump has directed several vitriolic tweets at Bezos, accusing Amazon of using "our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.)" and "putting many thousands of retailers out of business!" After a sharp tweet on Monday morning, Amazon's stocks went down 5 percent, and four people close to Trump told Sherman that he wants to use Twitter to hurt the company. "It's war," one person said, with another revealing: "He gets obsessed with something, and now he's obsessed with Bezos. Trump is like, how can I f--k with him?"

Trump has said he wants the U.S. Postal Service to increase Amazon's shipping costs, ignoring his former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who told him that Amazon is actually boosting business, Sherman reports, and Trump has also been urged by advisers to cancel a pending multibillion contract Amazon has with the Pentagon to provide cloud computing services. The real issue, though, is that Bezos owns the Post, one person said, and the president can't get over that. "Trump doesn't like The New York Times, but he reveres it because it's his hometown paper," they said. "The Washington Post, he has zero respect for." Could it be because of this? Or maybe this? Perhaps this? Read more about Trump's one-sided war at Vanity Fair.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.