Team Trump wrongly blasts Amazon (and wants to keep you ignorant)

An unhinged reaction to an apparently false story that I wish were true

On Tuesday morning, I watched a remarkable spectacle during a White House press briefing.

A reporter asked a Punchbowl report that Amazon is planning to show tariff costs for items on their shopping platform where those import taxes would apply. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was answering questions but Press Sec Karoline Leavitt was clearly prepared for this one — so prepared that I suspect she planted the question — and jumped in to answer.

She said that Amazon had committed a “hostile and political act” and then held up a picture of an article from a few years ago and held up a printed page of a Reuters article from some time ago claiming that Amazon “partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”

First of all, her claims and denigrations are outrageous and disgusting coming from the federal government. Leavitt should be ashamed of herself but there’s no chance of that.

Second, if I had a retail platform, I’d do what the report said Amazon would be doing. And I have bought some items at websites that do just that.

Third, THE STORY WAS FALSE.

Tuesday White House Press Conference

The president, apparently in a panic, called Jeff Bezos to ask about his apparent treasonous act. Upon learning that the story wasn’t true, Trump told the press, “Jeff Bezos is very nice. Terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. Good guy.” Even here, Trump can’t admit that his team fell for an unverified report based on an unnamed “person familiar with the plan” from an online publication, and instead frames it as if Bezos was persuaded by Trump to “do the right thing.”

But as Leland Vittert asked Peter Navarro (lifelong Democrat, 4-time loser as a Democratic candidate for office, speaker at the Democratic National Convention, anti-growth zealot, union hack) on “On Balance” on News Nation last night, “What was Trump so afraid of?” When Navarro objected to the question (though I think it was the right question), Leland rephrased to, “What was Trump so angry about?” (Peter Navarro is the poster boy for the fact that having a graduate degree from an elite university doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about, or, alternatively, that you tell the truth. See also: “Paul Krugman”.)

Let’s take a stab at the answer: Trump and his minions are afraid that a platform as large and popular as Amazon would teach or remind Americans that it’s Americans who pay Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration is not fully on board with the prior administration’s war against “junk fees”, meaning roughly fees that you cannot get out of paying but that were not clearly disclosed at the time of purchase. That said, the president signed an executive order targeting these kinds of fees when it comes to event ticketing with a goal to “ensure price transparency at all stages of the…purchase process.” Sounds reasonable to me. After all, intentionally hiding a mandatory cost until after a transaction is agreed to sure seems like fraud.

And yet, Trump wants to prevent Amazon (and I presume anyone else) from creating this same kind of price transparency because he likes this particular junk fee as he feels that it’s going to him. After all, he does clearly think of government as his now.

Rather than a “hostile and political act”, any company that does what Trump briefly raged against yesterday would be performing an act of patriotism and I encourage every company to do it. Team Trump likes a “flood the zone” strategy so that opponents can’t get their footing or intervene to stop them, so let’s have patriotic American companies adopt the same strategy. I urge all major and minor retailers alike to show known or likely or estimated tariff costs (or a range if it’s too hard to give a precise number) for anything they sell that either has a direct tariff on it or anything they sell that is made with tariffed parts.

Remember how FedEx added a fuel surcharge during the worst days of high oil prices, or how some restaurants have added itemized surcharges to alert diners to government-imposed costs like an excessive minimum wage (or other things)? These are very useful, not just in pointing out the source of costs but also as being easier to roll back if/when the cost driver dissipates; if the excess were just added to one displayed price, the seller might find it easier to leave the higher price in place (or at least try to until market forces made them lower it).

Why not show tariffs just like most web sites show other taxes and fees the buyer will have to pay? And, a step further, why not show that a $100 item made in America that includes some tariffed imported parts would have cost $93 without the tariffs?

On Wednesday morning, the WSJ proposed something similar.

By the way, what Amazon said is that there was a discussion about showing possible import costs (meaning primarily tariffs) for a particular division of the company called Amazon Haul that aims to compete with Temu and other Chinese websites by explicitly importing low-price goods (under $20), almost all of which would be Chinese as far as I can tell. And they said that the suggestion was not approved and was never even considered for the main Amazon site.

So, the government of the United States slandered a major American corporation about a story that wasn’t true (but would have been fine, or even preferable, if it were true) because they thought it might hurt them politically.

There is a name for a system of government that, among other things, coerces private businesses to act in the interest of the state. I’ll just call it shameful.