WASHINGTON – Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services León Rodríguez naturalize 20 new U.S. Citizens in a Naturalization Ceremony held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., June 14, 2016. During the ceremony, Army Spc. Jae Seon Shim, led the Pledge of Allegiance, and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial medal. Official DHS photo by Barry Bahler.
After being at loggerheads with President Donald Trump and competing for years with Special Government Employee Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos has made a rapprochement with the President and has even changed the opinion page of the Washington Post to promote “free markets and personal liberty.” Bezos announced the changes he was making to the traditionally radical left-leaning WashPo editorial page via a post on X.com. Read it below:
I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too…
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 26, 2025
The Wall Street Journal’s Joshua Chaffin and Joe Flint note some other recent actions by Bezos that have served to ingratiate him with both the President and the political right in general. They write:
The world’s third-richest man does not often show deference. But Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space pioneer, is a businessman, like any other, trying to make his way in the era of Donald Trump.
Bezos joined the caravan of billionaires and tech titans who trekked to Mar-a-Lago to pay their respects in the days after Trump’s election victory. His turn came on an evening in mid-December, when Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, dined with Trump and Melania. At some point in the evening, Elon Musk joined the party.
It was a strange tableau: Bezos wedged between the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man. Trump had smeared him and sought to brutalize his businesses during his first term in the White House; Musk is his business rival and sneering antagonist in the contest of billionaire space explorers.
For Bezos, that dinner was but one of a series of recent Trump-friendly gestures that have turned heads and prompted onlookers to wonder just what game he is playing as he positions himself for the second chapter of MAGA rule. Is Bezos putting on a patient and calculating defense, like a student of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” or has he undergone a Trump-era political transformation? Does he have fixed politics or principles, or is he governed more by shifting levels of testosterone and ruthlessness?
These questions apply not only to Bezos but to a coterie of fellow tech lords who appear to have blown with the Trumpian wind, most notably, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. He delighted Trump with his recent decision to end moderation on Facebook while jettisoning DEI policies at his company. Outwardly, the chain-wearing Zuck appears to have undergone a MAGA bro makeover.
Yet Bezos’s seeming shift may be more surprising. During Trump’s first term, he held the line as the new owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate fame that cast itself for a new generation of readers as a leader of The Resistance. The paper paired its aggressive coverage of Trump with a tagline that expressed its sense of mission: Democracy Dies In Darkness.
That commitment came into question, however, in late October, 11 days before the election, when Bezos suspended the Post’s longstanding practice of endorsing presidential candidates. The move deprived Democrat Kamala Harris of the paper’s blessing and was intended, Bezos said, to protect the Post’s credibility. The timing was awkward, to say the least.
Then came a million-dollar contribution by Amazon to Trump’s inauguration, as well as the streaming service’s $40 million deal with First Lady Melania Trump for an authorized documentary. The fee was three times the offer of the next-highest bidder, according to reporting by this paper.
There were the fawning tweets that Bezos lavished on a victorious Trump and his pride of place alongside other tech leaders at the inauguration—Zuckerberg, Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai, among others. Their seating on the dais just behind Trump, and in front of the cabinet, could be read in two ways: a historic assemblage of new-age wealth and power giving their support to the new administration, or a hostage video of billionaires held captive by a menacing strongman.
This week brought another bombshell when Bezos announced that the Washington Post’s opinion pages would be devoted, henceforth, to defending the principles of “personal liberty and free markets.” The rightward swerve prompted the resignation of the section’s editor, David Shipley. Critics have denounced the move as an effort to stifle liberal dissent and criticism of Trump, while others have pointed out that such views are plentiful in other publications.
“I was stunned,” Martin Baron, who was Bezos’s first editor at the Post, said of his reaction. He called the changes “deeply disturbing…and a betrayal of the history of the Post.”
Read more here.
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