Amazon has a Donald Trump problem. For days now, the president has been tweeting about the online retail giant, accusing it of ripping off the U.S. Postal Service, shortchanging state and local governments on taxes, and using these unfair advantages to put countless retailers out of business. “Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon,” he tweeted on Monday. “THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country...not a level playing field!”

Trump is almost certainly lashing out at Amazon because its CEO owns The Washington Post, which has been critical of his presidency. And this raises legitimate concerns about creeping authoritarianism.

“[A] President who routinely threatens prosecutorial or regulatory vengeance against private companies because they are not sufficiently politically subservient to him personally is entirely outside of our system of governance,” TPM’s Josh Marshall wrote on Sunday. “At present, Donald Trump is an autocrat without an autocracy. The system mostly resists his demands because it’s not designed to operate that way and we have centuries worth of norms that are remarkably resilient. But systems change. And it’s clear that ours is already starting to change under his malign influence.”

It’s valid to condemn government by vendetta. But I don’t think it logically follows that, as Marshall suggests, one must subordinate concerns about Amazon to concerns about Trump. That’s because Trump has been largely ineffective at bringing any company to heel, and in fact has bolstered Amazon quite a bit on his watch. Nor is Trump particularly interested in taking steps to make the playing field more level for retailers. But the most important fact to remember amid his spat with Amazon is that the government has been propping up the company for the entirety of its existence.

First off, the evidence that Trump is an autocrat, demanding fealty from private companies, is largely limited to mean tweets. The Republican tax overhaul that Trump signed last year could have singled out Amazon for harsh treatment, but the company still qualifies for every corporate tax break. In fact, under Trump’s watch, Amazon secured a change to federal procurement laws that will allow the Defense Department to purchase all commercial items on the Amazon marketplace. It’s also on the verge of winning a $10 billion cloud contract to host top-secret Pentagon data through its Amazon Web Services division. (There are rumors Trump may push the Defense Department to cancel that contract.)