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As rumors of imminent layoffs swirled around the Washington Post newsroom late last month, Post owner Jeff Bezos was unavailable for comment; he and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were too busy enjoying Paris Fashion Week.
Meanwhile, just blocks from the Post’s DC offices, the White House was hosting a private screening of Melania, a documentary about the first lady. (It has the feel of “an OnlyFans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories,” panned the New Yorker—2/2/26.)
The screening was held as nearly half the US was under a winter storm emergency, and as Minneapolis convulsed following the Trump administration’s killing, only hours earlier, of another ICE observer, Alex Pretti. But the show must go on.
The eye-popping $75 million price tag for Melania was paid by Amazon, the company Bezos founded. While Bezos couldn’t attend the screening, being in Paris and all, his successor, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, was there.
Days later, Melania had its premiere at the Kennedy Center (now the Trump-Kennedy Center, because why not?). As Donald Trump walked the red carpet (which was actually black, in keeping with the first lady’s new aesthetic), an impertinent reporter asked whether the “exorbitant fee” Amazon paid for the film amounted to a bribe (CNN, 2/1/26). Trump didn’t deny it, saying: “I’m not involved. That was done with my wife.”
‘This is not right’
Bezos—who remains Amazon’s executive chair and its largest shareholder—certainly has incentive to bribe Trump, after experiencing Trump’s wrath in his first term.
In 2019, amid the Washington Post’s critical reporting on Trump, Amazon lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing deal, an event that unnerved Bezos. He was “deeply hurt” and “sat there going: ‘This is not right,’” a person who met with Bezos days later told the Financial Times (3/20/25).
So in 2024, when it looked like Trump might return to the Oval Office, Bezos quietly reached out, and even suggested a running mate for Trump (Axios, 2/27/25). (Bezos’ pick, then–North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, is Trump’s Interior Secretary.)
Then, in the closing days of the election, Bezos went further, personally killing the Post’s planned endorsement of Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris (FAIR, 10/30/24).
The response from Post readers was immediate, with over 300,000 canceling their subscriptions. While this dealt a blow to the Post, Bezos’ remake of the paper was only getting started, as were his overtures to Trump.
An outright bribe’?
After Trump’s win, Bezos and Sanchez jetted down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. It was here that “Melania regaled Bezos and [Sánchez] with the [documentary] project’s details at dinner” (Wall Street Journal, 2/13/25).
“Just over two weeks later,” the Journal reported,
Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film—the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary, and nearly three times the next-closest offer.
Of that sum, roughly $28 million “will go directly in the first lady’s pocket” (Financial Times, 3/20/25). Meanwhile, Amazon is also providing an “unheard-of marketing budget” of $35 million (New Yorker, 2/2/26).
“How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?” asked Ted Hope, a former Amazon executive (New York Times, 1/28/26). “How can that not be the case?
Still, how could Bezos be sure these millions were enough to stave off Trump’s second-term wrath? With so many billions in federal contracts at stake—both for Amazon and Bezos’ personal space company, Blue Origin—it was better to be safe than sorry.
And a month into Trump’s second term, Bezos made a major announcement. He was banishing all viewpoints from the Post’s opinion pages except those promoting “personal liberties and free markets.” (This led to another 75,000-plus canceled subscriptions.)
If Post columnists objected to the pro-Trump turn, they could take a generous buyout on offer last year. So many rushed for the exits, it was “an absolute exodus,” said one Postie, while another decried the “purge” underway.
Mandatory enthusiasm
Those who remained were required to show excitement. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” explained Adam O’Neal, the Washington Post’s new 33-year-old opinions editor (Status, 7/14/25). “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”
O’Neal has led by example. His editorial board—whose full membership is “a closely guarded secret” (Press Watch, 12/12/25)—has pumped out a steady stream of pro-Trump editorials “that read like they’d be a stretch for Pravda to pull off” (Nation, 2/4/26).
Among O’Neal’s greatest hits: praising Trump’s gaudy ballroom and defending his demolition of the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25); cautioning against releasing more Epstein files (11/20/25); justifying Trump’s military takeover of DC (FAIR, 8/14/25); hailing Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26); opposing raising taxes on billionaires (1/1/26); and quietly advancing Bezos’ business interests (NPR, 10/28/25).
When Bezos’ axe fell last week, O’Neal wasn’t among the nearly half of the newsroom laid off. Nor was Marc Thiessen, who penned an October column (10/9/25) headlined “Yes, Trump Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize”; nor Megan McArdle, who outdid herself with a 2021 column (7/13/21) headlined “The Billionaires’ Space Race Benefits the Rest of Us. Really.”
‘Self-inflicted brand destruction’
“Here’s what I keep coming back to,” wrote media critic Parker Malloy (Present Age, 2/6/26):
The opinion section doesn’t seem to have been touched. The part of the paper Bezos spent the last two years overhauling, the one he remade in his own ideological image? That part is doing fine… [Meanwhile] the part of the paper that covers wars and investigates corruption and holds the government (and Amazon) accountable? That’s the part he decided he could live without.
The Washington Post newsroom not too long ago numbered over a thousand journalists, thanks to Bezos’ doubling of the paper’s roster as a new owner. But the famed paper is now down to as few as 400 journalists after last week’s jettisoning of more than 300 reporters. (It’s “one of the largest single-day cullings at a US news organization in recent memory,” noted the Financial Times—2/6/26). Among those out of a job is Caroline O’Donovan, who covered Amazon for the Post.
The Metro section, once home to around 200 reporters, is left with just 10 journalists to cover a region of nearly 6.5 million people. “We had twice that many journalists in Fairfax alone back in the day,” noted New York Times journalist Peter Baker (X, 2/7/26), who previously covered Virginia for the Post. “And it mattered.”
“This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (Status, 2/7/26). “Bezos’ sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own.”
‘Billionaires need losses’
Jeff Bezos couldn’t be troubled to deliver the news to Posties that he was laying them off en masse. Nor could Bezos’ handpicked publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, who was busy partying in San Francisco ahead of the Super Bowl. (A photo of Lewis walking the red carpet at an NFL event went viral, and before Super Bowl Sunday’s opening snap, he was also out of a job—one that reportedly paid him $3 million a year.)
So, it was left to executive editor Matt Murray to deliver the grim news on a company-wide morning Zoom call. The firings, Murray dutifully explained, were due to budget constraints. But were they really?
Washington City Paper had reportedly offered to buy the Post’s Metro and Sports sections—and thereby preserve those reporters’ jobs—but was turned down by the Post (Verge, 2/10/26).
“I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money. Amazon, after all, just spent $75 million buying and promoting a documentary about Melania Trump,” wrote Glenn Kessler (Substack, 2/3/26), the Post’s former Factchecker. And last summer Bezos dropped $50 million on his June wedding, after spending “$500 million on the most expensive superyacht in the world—twice what he paid for the Post.”
Bezos bought the Post for “the bargain price of $250 million” in 2013, at a time when both he and Amazon were laying down roots in DC amid growing antitrust concerns. Back then, Bezos’ holdings totaled $25 billion. Today, you need to tack on another zero, as Bezos’ wealth has soared to $250 billion. The Post’s losses, reportedly as much as $100 million a year, are mere pocket change for him—if they’re really losses at all.
“Billionaires like losses. They need losses,” ProPublica editor Jesse Eisinger wrote on X (2/4/26):
Those losses mean that you receive the entertainment value or power from your hobby or side-gig while off-setting income from your real business…. That means Bezos isn’t cutting the WaPo to stem the losses, no matter how much his execs and the media say it. He’s cutting one of the most important news sources in the US for another reason.
Hosting Hegseth
As Washington Post reporters desperately tried to reach Bezos to plead for their jobs, he “stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth” at Blue Origin’s Florida facility (Nation, 2/4/26). Blue Origin holds billions in Pentagon contracts, but there’s always room for growth in a military budget that Trump wants upped to $1.5 trillion next year.
Seeing a beaming Bezos standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hegseth was an ominous sign for what was to befall Post reporters—one of whose home was raided by the FBI only three weeks earlier, at the request of Hegseth’s self-proclaimed Department of War (FAIR.org, 1/21/26). While Bezos still hasn’t said a word in defense of the targeted reporter, Hannah Natanson, there he was bro-ing it up with Hegseth—who also made headlines last fall when he banished reporters from the Pentagon unless they pledged to become little more than stenographers (FAIR.org, 9/23/25).
Post reporters, along with nearly the entirety of the Pentagon press corps, refused to sign on the dotted line.
The same can’t be said for Bezos.
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