Amazon gets the last laugh after Donald Trump launches bizarre attack on the company
Donald Trump is now saddled with criminal scandals, personal scandals, cabinet scandals, corruption scandals, porn star scandals, and treason scandals, among other scandals. So which one did he decide to try to fend off when he woke up Thursday morning? None of the above, as he instead launched a bizarre attack on popular online retailer Amazon. But it turned out Amazon got the last laugh.
Trump posted this whacked out tweet about Amazon before the sun came up on Thursday: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” This led some investors to momentarily fear that Trump might somehow use the federal government to try to harm Amazon’s business prospects, causing shares of Amazon stock to open sharply lower.
But by the end of the day, investors seemed to come to their senses, perhaps recalling that Trump tweets angry stupid nonsense like this all the time but rarely tries to actually do anything about it, and tends to fall flat on his face when he does try. By the time the market closed on Thursday afternoon, shares of Amazon stock had fully recovered and were up 1.1% on the day. For all his bluster, Trump can’t truly harm most of the targets he tries to bully, and more people are figuring that out than ever.
On the other hand, Donald Trump did appear to unwittingly give something away in the process. After people had trouble figuring out why he was attacking Amazon, his new campaign manager Brad Parscale came along and tried insisting that Amazon, and not Facebook, was somehow the real thief of user data. In other words, this was all a panicked, incoherent, and failed attempt at distracting the public from the fact that the Trump campaign stole Facebook user data while cheating its way to an election victory. Oops.
