Good News: Trump is Reportedly “Obsessed” With Going After Amazon

President Trump is good now. I mean, his rationale behind going after America’s retail giant is the same vain, self-absorbed nonsense that drives all his decisions. But here, our president’s aggressive incompetence may actually do some good. America lets our tech giants get away with damn near whatever they want, as the ordeal with Facebook is presently highlighting for all to see. Hell, Amazon literally treats their warehouse workers like cattle.

Here’s how nuts the whole situation with Amazon is:

— Amazon made $60.5 billion in revenue in the 4th quarter of 2017.
— They paid $0 in taxes.
— That’s right.
— $0.

As the ridiculous competition for their 2nd headquarters has demonstrated, Amazon is wildly successful in large part because they exploit every tax loophole imaginable. Now, the manchild-in-chief is openly grousing about changing that reality. Per Axios:

Capitol Hill wants Facebook’s blood, but President Trump isn’t interested. Instead, the tech behemoth Trump wants to go after is Amazon, according to five sources who’ve discussed it with him. “He’s obsessed with Amazon,” a source said. “Obsessed.”

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What we’re hearing: Trump has talked about changing Amazon’s tax treatment because he’s worried about mom-and-pop retailers being put out of business.

Trump is mad because his rich friends claim that Amazon hurts their brick-and-mortar retail businesses. He also is wrongly convinced that Amazon gets a free ride from taxpayers over their usage of the Post Office, when reality proves the exact opposite: Amazon has been great for the United States Postal Service. It’s created more business for them. I thought that was a good thing. This tweet from December summarizes Trump’s simple mindset.

Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017

Trump also wants to go after Amazon because of Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post, because as always, this is all about him. The negative reports coming out of America’s most respected national newspaper are directly connected to our largest online retailer in his infantile brain. There’s a really good chance that this all ends in a gigantic mess with The Washington Post stuck in the middle, but if Amazon actually starts to pay taxes for once, then we can say with certainty that the Trump presidency wasn’t a 100% disaster. Just like, 99.999999%.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.