When you’ve lost the puppet masters…
Corporate billionaires like Jeff Bezos may have never been in Trump’s corner, but when Trump won in November, they certainly didn’t hesitate to try to work with him. And why not? As opportunists, they figured they might as well buddy up to Trump and get their corporate tax breaks and profitable deregulation.
The trouble is, Trump turned around and immediately started tanking the economy – not just for the working class but for everyone. The stock market has taken a major hit. Even more distressingly for the corporate billionaire class, Trump’s senile obsession with tariffs is beginning to make international trade nearly impossible. And now Bezos has apparently had enough.
Amazon leaked to the media that it was considering spelling out tariff pricing on its website, so that customers would understand how much of the cost was Amazon’s price and how much of the cost was Trump’s idiocy. Amazon then coyly denied the story when it was asked about it. But it’s not difficult to see what this was all about. Amazon is trying to use the specter of spelling out tariffs on its website to pressure Trump into dropping his tariffs against China. Bezos is an actual billionaire, and he has Trump by the you know what, and he’s not afraid to use that leverage.
Given that Trump has already backed down and “suspended” his tariffs against most nations, it’s possible he’ll cave to Bezos and the other corporate billionaires on China tariffs as well. But either way, Trump has clearly lost the corporate billionaire class. The CEOs of Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s have already reportedly informed Trump in private that they’ll have empty shelves by this summer if he doesn’t get his act together. Trump is the world’s worst businessman, and the economic puppet masters who have actual money have had enough of him.
