Through the spiked Washington Post endorsement editorial to the recent spiked editorial cartoon, it’s been difficult to get a precise read on Jeff Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump. As I wrote back in late October, there are very rational reasons for Bezos to want to avoid being on Trump’s shit list. Above all else, Trump isn’t nice. Amazon is a phantasmagoria of anti-trust problems. Trump wouldn’t need to break a lot of norms to sic the Justice Department on it. Amazon is also a major, major federal contractor. Same applies there. There’s no right to government contracts. Then there’s something that doesn’t get discussed much. SpaceX now has a dominant hold on satellite deployment and owns and controls like half the operating satellites in near-Earth orbit. But Bezos’s BlueOrigin isn’t quite an also ran. It still has a shot at being a competitor to SpaceX and Bezos reportedly now focuses most of his energy there. He at least needs Trump’s friendship to have a shot at that.
In that context came news last night that Amazon has agreed to underwrite and license a documentary about the life of past and future First Lady Melania Trump.
I don’t think it’s bias on my part to think there’s little reason to believe Melania, Woman of Destiny (my title, but who knows?) isn’t likely to be the next Game of Thrones or Ted Lasso. How much demand is there exactly for the stream and theatrical release of the Melania doc?
This seems like a pretty good sign that the titans of corporate America don’t look content to just be friendly to Trump but definitely go all in as special friends to the incoming President. It may not be quite North Korea territory, though who knows? But it does look more and more like the model of post-Soviet republics in which you have a nominal democracy in which an emerging class of oligarchs bid for the favor of the strong man with accelerating and competitive feats of dignity-losing strength. First, ABC’s decision to take the L in Trump’s defamation suit. Now, Jeff Bezos’s decision to fund a look at the heroic story of Melania Trump’s rise from post-Titoist Yugoslavia to trendsetter in the field of arm-candying.
As I noted in a conversation last night, I don’t envy the position of the hundreds of journalists at The Washington Post who continue to do — criticisms on the merits notwithstanding — a great deal of very high quality journalism. Bezos has now put his cards very clearly on the table.
