Donald Trump's attacks on Amazon are transparently political Republicans used to believe that politicians, particularly presidents, shouldn't pick corporate winners and losers: Our view

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Far more than previous presidents, Donald Trump has taken to picking on individual companies.

Trump has frequently taken aim at CNN parent company Time Warner, and his Justice Department is challenging its proposed merger with AT&T.

And lately he has grown fixated with Amazon, claiming several times this week, as he has before, that it pays too little in taxes and gets too good a deal from the U.S. Postal Service.

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Any other administration would see the AT&T-Time Warner merger as unobjectionable. And any other administration would see Amazon for what it is, a phenomenally innovative and disruptive business that generally plays by the rules, pays its taxes, and provides something of a lifeline for a troubled postal service.

For Trump, however, soundness of arguments seems to count less than his personal animosities. His distaste for CNN prompts him to oppose anything that might benefit Time Warner. And he thinks his Amazon outbursts will rattle the cage of its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013.

It has been a while since a president engaged in this level of politicization of business. The best comparison is probably President Kennedy’s intervention in a 1962 steel strike to pressure companies to give in to union demands. That move was unfortunate as it did nothing to save steel jobs in the long run and made government complicit in the industry’s decline by helping to make it less competitive.

But Trump's actions go further as they are so petty, so personal — and so contrary to Republican orthodoxy that politicians, particularly presidents, shouldn't be picking corporate winners and losers.

His arguments — particularly those related to Amazon — do not hold water. The company has minimized its federal income tax bill by putting growth above profits. It collects and pays state sales taxes on its own products, and will do so on request for third-party vendors that account for about half of its business.

The U.S. Postal Service argument is even further off-base. It is losing money largely because of the decline in traditional first-class mail and its huge pension obligations. But its package delivery service, including what comes from Amazon, is profitable and growing.

Trump likes to cite a Citigroup analysis that the Postal Service is undercharging by $1.46 per package. That analysis applies to all packages, not just those from Amazon. It might or might not be accurate. And it does not mean the Postal Service is losing money, just that it could make more. But Amazon has mused publicly about starting its own delivery service, suggesting that the Postal Service's ability to raise rates is limited.

To these dubious claims, Trump adds an argument generally made by liberals: that Amazon is taking jobs away from its competitors.

That's obviously true. But government did not stop industrial giants of the 19th and early 20th centuries on the grounds that they were hurting craft guilds. It did not thwart cars to protect the horse-and-buggy industry, air travel to protect a passenger rail, or online sites to protect traditional travel agents. And it should not coddle Amazon’s competitors.

Those competitors, by the way, are more likely to be big retail chains and manufacturers rather than the mom-and-pop shops depicted by Trump. In fact, the big chains did in the small retailers.

If Trump wanted to do something useful, he would press Congress to pass long-stalled measures to put the Postal Service on a sounder financial footing by closing under-utilized offices, cutting back on Saturday delivery, and reducing its labor costs — rather than bash a success story of American capitalism.

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