In a stunning announcement on Friday, the Washington Post revealed that it would not endorse a candidate for president in 2024, the first time the paper has declined to do so since 1988. To have neglected to pick between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis is one thing; to decline to endorse between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is another. The timing of the decision (eleven days before the election), and the fact that it came as a surprise to much of the newspaper’s staff, including both news and opinion writers, is more than suspect. It also seems fair to say that a sudden change of heart by the vehemently anti-Trump editorial board can be ruled out. Considering all that, what remains is, unfortunately, not much of a mystery.
In a statement, the Post’s chief executive, Will Lewis, attempted to assert that the newspaper’s decision amounted a return to its “roots,” including such lofty principles as “character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects” (The Post did not endorse candidates for president until Jimmy Carter in 1976). One imagines that Mr. Lewis himself has less experience with writing on a short deadline than his employees, and one also must suppose that the clunkiness of the statement suggests that Lewis himself does not believe what he is saying.
Voices from inside the newspaper are telling a totally different story about the decision: the Post’s editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president and was preparing to publish it when the paper’s owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, nixed the plans. Bezos, whose rocket company Blue Origin relies on precious government contracts, and whose company Amazon was dealt a major anti-monopolist suit by the Federal Trade Commission in 2023, is at a tricky point in his career in which he is uniquely vulnerable to government and political pressure. Bezos’ rejection of the endorsement seems to have been motivated by a fear that, if Donald Trump is elected president, his affiliation with Harris through the endorsement would damage his other business prospects (Amazon lost a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract to Microsoft in 2019, possibly under similar pressures). Brazenly, top officials at Blue Origin met with Donald Trump the very day the Post announced its decision: Bezos, seeing a 50-50 race, is preparing for Trump.
Even Marty Baron, the former publisher of the Washington Post under Bezos, who has previously asserted that Bezos “never interfered” with the newspaper’s coverage during his tenure, was left blindsided by this decision. Baron called the non-endorsement “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Considering Donald Trump’s oft-repeated plans to target his “enemies” in a second term in office, this judgment (by a former Bezos defender and partner, no less) is not unfounded. That’s the real problem here—not what the Post does now, but what this episode indicates it would be compelled to do (or not do) in a second Trump term.
This October surprise reveals the chilling effect a second Trump presidency will have on the independent press. We know that Trump wants the kind of media, not just generals, that Hitler had. He already lambastes friendly Fox News for falling short of his state-TV standards when it disobediently airs an interview with his opponent. The enormous leverage he exerts over Fox (and the half-Nelson in which he has pinned the newlywed Rupert Murdoch) led them to broadcast knowingly false lies about the integrity of the 2020 election to the largest TV news audience in America. Trump has threatened The Atlantic magazine over its investigative reports revealing Trump’s brazenly unpatriotic comments about the military (including the aforementioned one about Hitler’s generals, just published last week by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg). He spent much of his first term in office directing venomous Twitter screeds at the New York Times, turning millions of Americans against the highest quality newspaper in the country. He has called the media the “enemy of the American people.”
None of that is new. What is new–or at least at a new level–is that Trump’s aspirationally authoritarian goal of “chilling” free and fair coverage by newspapers is no longer a fantasy. And, let’s face it, the vulnerable financial position of most of these outlets (except, perhaps for the Wordle-and-Connections-owning-New York Times) has allowed this to happen. The fact that it is Bezos who owns the Post makes it all the easier for Trump. After all, the Washington Post’s financial insecurities were what allowed Bezos to purchase the newspaper in the first place. The same pressures were placed on the Los Angeles Times, whose relatively new megarich owner also put the kibosh on a Harris endorsement, possibly for similar reasons. And while Bezos did a lot for the Post, injecting money and vigor into many of its initiatives, it should not be controversial to posit that the man—perhaps one of the five most successful capitalists in human history—does not use the principles of the fourth estate as his North Star in business. Remember “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Apparently that once annoyingly apocalyptic credo was, for Bezos, the consummate CEO, just another slogan. Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History, whatever kind.
In his memoir, Marty Baron asserted that in the first Trump term, Bezos could “neither be courted nor clobbered into submission.” That may have been true then, but we have every reason to believe that a second Trump term would resemble the first one about as much as the second Joker film resembles the first. Trump is approaching the day when he will no longer be simply an aspirational authoritarian (a “wannabe dictator” as Gen. Mark Milley has called him), but rather the thing itself. He is salivating at the prospect. In the meantime, Jeff Bezos’ teeth are chattering. Bezos may have evaded the “courting” and the “clobbering”, but right now he is being chilled to the bone: the man is utterly terrified of a second Trump term. And while one could hope for more of a backbone from someone occupying the position once held by the formidable Kay Graham—who led the Post through Watergate and the Pentagon Papers—Bezos is not wrong to be afraid.
In fact, he should be. Fear of Trump’s plans to expand executive power and direct it against those who defy him is already having a chilling impact on American civil society. If Trump is re-elected, some of our most important institutions may practically freeze in fear of his retribution, which could take the form of lawsuits, public threats, loss of influence, or even harsher forms of coercion. Ironically, the Supreme Court ruling on president immunity this summer, which would give Trump license to pursue this retribution, was based on the idea that I’ve just discussed: that fear of political prosecution would have a “chilling” effect on the essential “responsibilities” of the presidency. The Court used the right paradigm to help the wrong person. Trump aside, we have had an “imperial presidency” for a long, long time, at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, key government agencies, and, yes, the media. There is no reasonable fear that president Trump would be “chilled” from carrying out his purges of opponents, including Kamala Harris endorsers. And while this does not justify Bezos’ craven and cowardly decision, it does seem to explain it. No American politician was ever intended to have so much power. It’s not just Jeff Bezos, who has more power than any private American ever was supposed to, who should find the prospect chilling.
