"Oligarchy, The Rule of Law, and the Democratic Order"

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

85% : So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play.
65% : If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you.
61% : If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
48% : If Trump wins?
46% : Indeed, the photo atop this post was borrowed from a June 2017 essay titled "Meet Jeff Bezos: the Amazon billionaire daring to take on Trump and the White House."
43% : The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
43% : Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded.
41% : Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won -- not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
39% : What Trump understood was that Bezos's submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet.
35% : See also Chris Cillizza's February 2019 piece, "Donald Trump's long and dramatic history with Jeff Bezos."A couple of readers pointed me to an essay by Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last, "Bezos, Trump, and the Failure of Democracy," that brings the multiple threads together in a way that resonates with me.
34% : The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has already taught Trump -- in the words of Yale's [Timothy] Snyder, a leading U.S. expert on fascism -- what power can do, and if he prevails in next week's election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force.
33% : But Bezos and Trump have just taught America's remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on "kitchen-table" issues is past.
32% : In the back and forth the last couple of days over the billionaire owners of the LAT and WaPo preventing their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris, it struck me that the objections were mostly driven by a sense 1) that the papers had a duty to stand up against Donald Trump in the latest Most Crucial Election In The History Of The Republic; 2) that editorial independence should prevail over the wishes of the owners; 3) that the owners are simply feckless cowards kowtowing to Trump; and 4) that this is just the latest example of how billionaires are ruining the country.
31% : While the hysteria here is understandable, it's predicated on facts not in evidence: that the owners were in fact currying favor with Trump and/or afraid of reprisals in the event of a second Trump presidency.
31% : This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden.
24% : If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
23% : The rest of the report contains some speculation from staffers, most damning of which is former editor-at-large Robert Kagan (who resigned over the matter) claiming it was "clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying" with Trump.
19% : A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would -- like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump -- adhere to the rule of law.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.