Bezos, Trump and the failure of democracy

Editor’s note: I’ve been thinking about it WashingtonPost story all weekend and felt compelled to write another bonus Triad about it because people seem to both misdiagnose and underestimate what happened in the event WashingtonPost. This is not about censorship or the media. It is a catastrophic failure of the rule of law.

This is a turning point that indicates we are in greater danger than we realized.

It’s time to get organized and prepare. In preparation for what is to come. That is what we are doing The strongholdevery day. I hope you’ll join us. There is power in community.

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ON FRIDAY, after the WashingtonPostWhen the newspaper’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of having an editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that Donald Trump was meeting with Blue Origin executives — on the same day.

Blue Origin is of course the rocket company of Jeff Bezos, who also owns the WashingtonPost.

This was not a coincidence, nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wanted to keep hidden. The whole point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it would be public.

What we saw on Friday was not a case of censorship or media failure. It had nothing to do with journalism or the… WashingtonPost. It was something much a lot of more consequential damage. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law and the failure of the democratic order.

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When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not support Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission, born from an intuitive understanding of the candidates’ differences.

Bezos understood that if he opposed Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration – like all presidential administrations not led by Trump – would adhere to the rule of law.

Bezos also understood that the reverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his companies would become highly targeted.

So bending the knee to Trump was a smart move. All positive, no downside.

What Trump understood was that Bezos’ submission would be of limited use if kept quiet. Because the purpose of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was intended to send a message to all other businessmen, entrepreneurs and corporations in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

That’s why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day Bezos conceded. It was a demonstration, a very public demonstration.

But as bad as that sounds, it’s not the worst.

Worst of all are the underlying failures that made this scheme possible.

My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who leads the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed:

The American oligarch moment makes us look more like the Russia of the 1990s than we would like to believe. Political scientists can and will debate which comes first: oligarchs or spineless politicians. In the 1990s, Russia had that in abundance. Us too. That combination has undermined the rule of law there, and that is also the case here.

Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the After because he knows no one will enforce the law and stop Trump from seeking political retaliation. And on and on. The undermining effect on the rule of law is cumulative.

Bezos’ surrender is our warning bell about entering early 1990s Russia. No legal system can survive if there is a class that is not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.

And that is the fundamental point. Bezos’ surrender is not just now a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It is a signal that the rule of law has already been eroded to such an extent that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.

That is why he sought protection in the embrace of the strong man.

Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won – not the election, but his fight to violate the rule of law.

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Yesterday Timothy Snyder called on Americans to do this not obey in advance. He’s right, of course. We must continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.

What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering on the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already halfway up the slope. And that is even if Harris wins.

If Trump wins? Well, I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.

But Bezos and Trump just taught America’s remaining small-town Democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win a bipartisan majority by focusing on “kitchen table issues,” is over. The task ahead will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.

The hour is later than we think.