Trump renews attack on Amazon’s USPS use
President Donald Trump lit into Amazon.com for the second time in three days with a pair of Twitter messages that said the online retailer “must pay real costs (and taxes) now!”
The president on Saturday claimed, citing reports he didn’t specify, that the U.S. Postal Service “will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon” and added that the “Post Office scam must stop.” Amazon has said the postal service, which has financial problems stretching back for years, makes money on its deliveries.
Amazon shed $53 billion in market value on Wednesday after Axios reported that the president is “obsessed” with regulating the e-commerce giant, whose founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post newspaper. Those losses were pared on Thursday, the final day of a shortened trading week, even as Trump tweeted that Amazon was using the postal service as its “Delivery Boy.”
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said on Thursday that while the president was displeased with the ecommerce giant, and particularly instances where third-party sellers on the site didn’t collect sales tax, there were no administrative actions planned against Amazon “at this time.”
Still, Brad Parscale, who’s managing Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, hinted in a tweet late Thursday that the administration may act to raise Amazon’s postal costs. “Once the market figures out that a single @ usps rule change will crush @amazon’s bottom line we will see,” Parscale wrote.
Amazon.com and the Washington Post have been regular punching bags for Trump. In July, the president mused about whether the newspaper was “being used as a lobbyist weapon” to keep Congress from looking into Amazon’s business practices. He echoed that comment on Saturday, saying the Post “is used as a ‘lobbyist’ and should so REGISTER.”
Trump is spending Easter Weekend at his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and arrived at the nearby Trump International Golf Club early Saturday, just after the tweets were published. He also criticized Amazon over Twitter during his winter vacation at Mar-a-Lago, saying in December that the postal service “should be charging MUCH MORE for package delivery.”