One of the dangers of demagogues is that they can tarnish good causes. Since last week, President Donald Trump has waged a political war against Amazon, which he accuses of taking advantage of the U.S. Postal Service and putting retail stores out of business:

I am right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy. 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?)! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2018

Trump’s motives are almost certainly personal: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, which has been critical of the president. Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman reports that a source close to the White House said Trump “gets obsessed with something, and now he’s obsessed with Bezos. Trump is like, ‘How can I fuck with him?’”



Trump’s vendetta against Amazon presents a dilemma for progressives. He’s acting out of spite, and exhibiting an authoritarian desire to crush his critics, but there are legitimate grounds for believing Amazon is too powerful and that the government must do something about it. The company has been controversial from the start, since its business model initially relied on not having to collect sales tax, giving it a competitive advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers.

“In its pursuit of bigness, Amazon has left a trail of destruction—competitors undercut, suppliers squeezed—some of it necessary, and some of it highly worrisome,” Franklin Foer wrote in The New Republic in 2014. “And in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette, it has entered a phase of heightened aggression unseen even when it tried to crush Zappos by offering a $5 rebate on all its shoes or when it gave employees phony business cards to avoid paying sales taxes in various states.”

The case against Amazon—like the company itself—has only grown since then, and largely comes from the burgeoning anti-monopoly movement on the political left, which also wants to rein in other tech giants like Facebook and Google. But Trump and his supporters are co-opting the movement’s language because it has broad trans-ideological appeal in this populist moment.