Et Tu Fox News?
Fox News seems increasingly uncomfortable with Trump's repeated attacks on Amazon and Jeff Bezos
Fox News seems pretty uncomfortable with President Trump's personal campaign to hurt Amazon, and it's not just resident record-straightener Shepard Smith — though Shep Smith got the ball rolling. "There is a great deal of confusion or something here regarding Amazon and the post office, because none of that, none of that was true," he said Tuesday after playing and debunking Trump's arguments about Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service. "I think it could very simply be put down to: This is a feud between the president and Jeff Bezos," White House correspondent John Roberts said, "and you know, sometimes you have your own facts when you're in a feud."
On Wednesday's Special Report, Chris Wallace noted that Bezos hasn't responded to Trump at all. But "if you own stock at Amazon you are probably not too happy with President Trump these days," he said, introducing a segment on the ethical and legal concerns with Trump's vendetta.
And Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz even took Trump to task on Wednesday. Other presidents have made negative comments about business, he began, and Trump's hit-your-enemies approach "made sense in the cutthroat real estate and development world that he lived in in New York, that he grew up in. It's very different when you're president and a few words from you can decimate a company's stock. Now it would be one thing if the president was proposing actual policies," Kurtz added, but "I think what makes this different, and why the president is getting press, and not even getting that much support from some of his usual conservative cheerleaders, is that the attack on Amazon seems so personal."
"Really this is about Jeff Bezos and his other company, The Washington Post — the president's acknowledged this," Kurtz said. "That's why the fact that other presidents have gone after business matters a little less, because this seems so personal." Watch below. Peter Weber