Large corporations have reaped the rewards of having Donald Trump in the White House. The passage of a $1.5 trillion tax bill whose largest component was a corporate tax cut; the appointment of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting director, Mick Mulvaney, who is determined to pull back on consumer financial protections; the gutting of large automakers’ obligations to restrict pollutants in their emissions—these and other policy and personnel decisions have been made for the benefit of corporate interests. But Trump’s attacks this week on Amazon and its C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, are a reminder that the President’s seemingly boundless corporate favoritism is actually favoritism of a much more narrow and fickle kind.

The Amazon attacks have come via tweet. “I am right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “Amazon should pay these costs (plus) and not have them bourne by the American Taxpayer. Many billions of dollars. P.O. leaders don’t have a clue (or do they?)!” Trump also referenced the damaging effects that Amazon has had on traditional retail stores, writing, “Also, our fully paying retailers are closing stores all over the country... not a level playing field!” Amazon’s stock went down after these Presidential outbursts. But there’s reason to believe the real target of Trump’s anger was a different Bezos property: the Washington Post.

Reports in a handful of news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, have indicated that Trump has long been unhappy with the way he’s portrayed in the Post, which has been galvanized by an influx of new resources since Bezos bought it, in 2013, and has distinguished itself with its coverage of Trump’s campaign, Administration, and businesses. Last week, Trump referred to the Post as a “lobbyist” for Amazon, and he has previously called the newspaper the “AmazonWashingtonPost,” even though the two entities are separate companies. There is no evidence that Bezos has meddled in the Post’s editorial matters in any way—“He’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the Post’s editor, Martin Baron, told the Times, while insisting that the news organization covers Trump the way it would cover any President. But this hasn’t stopped Trump from repeating his assertions over and over, even as most of them have been debunked, from the claim that Amazon is responsible for the U.S. Postal Service’s multibillion-dollar annual losses (Amazon’s business has been seen as a bright spot for the U.S.P.S. amid a general drop in mail usage) to the idea that it alone is responsible for the decline of traditional retail (Amazon is one of several factors).

The Administration that Trump heads has a great degree of leverage over Amazon, and, perhaps because of this atmosphere of peril, Amazon has so far remained silent in the face of the President’s attacks. The government could file antitrust lawsuits to try to restrict certain parts of Amazon’s business, or block its attempts to merge with other companies. Amazon could also be compelled, through a variety of means, to collect more sales taxes on its transactions. And the company’s contract with the Postal Service expires in October and is about to be re-negotiated; Trump’s comments could infect the negotiations, even if he doesn’t take any other actions. Some of these measures would be in alignment with the aims of the economists and political activists who say that Amazon has grown too big. The company has recently come under scrutiny—along with other major technology companies—as concerns about privacy and monopoly power have become more intense. In a February appearance on CNBC, an N.Y.U. professor named Scott Galloway called for the breaking up of Amazon and other major tech companies. “The middle class is failing because of the consolidation of power among a few companies,” he told some startled-sounding CNBC anchors. Breaking the companies up would lead to “more hiring, a broader tax base, more competitors . . . maybe less billionaires, but more millionaires.”

Yet Trump’s targeting of Amazon can’t be seen as separate from his broader effort to undermine public confidence in the press and exert revenge on reporting he does not like. Last year, when the Justice Department indicated that it might not allow A.T. & T.’s merger with Time Warner, the owner of CNN, to go forward, news reports suggested that Trump had threatened to block the deal as a punishment for CNN’s unfavorable coverage of him. The A.T. & T.–Time Warner merger was controversial for reasons having nothing to do with Trump, and raised legitimate questions about concentration in the media market. (The Justice Department sued the companies, and the case is currently in court.) Still, the idea of a President using, or threatening to use, the full weight of the government to settle personal scores is something out of a petty autocracy—a ploy utilized by the illiberal leaders that Trump has often professed to admire.