Trump again slams Amazon over taxes, practices
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump fired off more criticism of Amazon on Thursday, saying that the online giant does not pay enough taxes — a day after a report suggested he wants to regulate the company.
The president’s commentary was made in a Twitter post in which he accused Amazon of putting thousands of local retailers out of business and of using the U.S. Postal Service as “their Delivery Boy.”
“I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election,” Trump wrote. “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use
our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
Amazon and the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, are among Trump’s regular Twitter targets. In December, Trump questioned whether the U.S. Postal Service charges Amazon enough for package deliveries. And in August, Trump said Amazon hurts taxpaying businesses.
Amazon, however, does pay taxes — $412 million in 2016, for instance, according to the company’s report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump has attacked Amazon on Twitter more than a dozen times since late 2015,
months after he had launched his presidential campaign. Many of those tweets seem to have been prompted by critical coverage in The Washington Post, the news organization that Bezos acquired personally in 2013 for $250 million.
Trump has repeatedly accused Bezos of using the Post as a tool to intimidate opponents in Washington into treating Amazon more favorably, although editors at the newspaper say Bezos plays no role in directing its news coverage.
The president’s latest broadside did not mention the Post, instead focusing on a handful of issues he has previously cited to criticize Amazon.
While Amazon once widely avoided collecting sales tax in states, it now collects it in every state that has one for goods that it sells from its own inventory. Some municipalities, however, have complained that Amazon does not collect local taxes under its agreements with states. And in most states Amazon does not collect sales taxes on sales of goods sold by third parties on its platform.
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment.
Raj Shah, a deputy White House press secretary, said Trump “has talked about the need to have tax parity between online retailers and brick-and-mortar retailers.”
Shah, speaking Thursday morning on the program Fox & Friends, said this was something Congress could help facilitate and that the president would support.
A day earlier, the media company Axios reported that Trump has wondered aloud whether Amazon could be vulnerable to antitrust or competition laws. White
House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later Wednesday that the administration isn’t considering any changes in policy directed at the company.
White House spokesman Lindsay Walters repeated that sentiment to reporters Thursday.
“The president has expressed his concerns with Amazon. We have no actions at this time,” she said.
Amazon shares fell almost 5 percent after the Axios article was published.
At the end of the day Thursday, Amazon’s stock, which is up more than 65 percent in the past 12 months, rose 1 percent to close at $1,447.34.
Trump’s use of social media to call out individual people and companies has been unprecedented for a president. His other Twitter targets have included Apple, Boeing and General Motors, as well as media outlets including the Post, The New York Times and CNN.
Trump has frequently complained about Amazon and Bezos to his friends, according to people who have spoken with the president. For example, at a dinner last month at Mar-a-Lago with Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera and the president’s two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, Trump brought up Amazon and said they should pay more in taxes, according to a person familiar with the dinner.
In December, Trump wrote on Twitter: “Why is the United
States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!”
His tweets about the Postal Service reflect a debate about whether the Postal Service is charging Amazon and other retailers enough to deliver packages. Parcel delivery has become an increasingly important part of the Postal Service’s business as first-class mail has been on a long-running decline.
Amazon’s partnership with the U.S. Postal Service is reviewed annually by the Postal Regulatory Commission, an oversight agency that also sets the rates that Amazon pays for shipping. Experts say that, by law, the Postal Service must charge rates that are profitable for it. Last year, the Postal Service reported profits of $7 billion and $20.7 billion in revenue.
In 2015, shortly after Trump started his attacks against the company, Bezos joked on Twitter about sending the candidate into space on a rocket made by Blue Origin, a space exploration startup Bezos owns.
But since Trump became president, Bezos and Amazon have become much quieter about his attacks. The company has refused to comment publicly about them. People who work there say privately that, while they do not enjoy Trump’s tweets, they are more likely to prompt eye rolling rather than some form of crisis control.
Trump’s latest criticism comes as the tech industry is facing a backlash to its power and influence. Facebook, Twitter and Google have come under scrutiny for their role in the 2016 presidential election, when people tied to Russia used the services to spread political messages and misinformation.
The focus on Facebook has intensified this month, after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, improperly harvested the information of 50 million users of the social network.
Brad Parscale, who is managing Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, said in a tweet that “Amazon has probably 10x the data on every American that Facebook does. All that data and own a political newspaper, The Washington Post. Hmm…..”