Jeff Bezos Calls Donald Trump's Bluff

A White House that relies on stupid ideas, lies and empty flattery makes losers out of all of us

Apr 30, 2025

Photo credit: MOLPIX/Shutterstock

Yesterday, Punchbowl News scooped an Amazon plan to change its online product display. Next to the price of the item, consumers would see how much of the asking price was due to Trump’s tariffs.

Predictably, the White House saw this as an unfair and dishonest personal attack on Donald J. Trump. “Why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?" Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asked in a typically nasty and confusing response. "And I would also add that it's not a surprise because, as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm." She also described the pricing scheme as a “hostile political act.”

You know what is a hostile political act? Campaigning on promises that you will deliver relief to strained household budgets, and then pursuing erratic, nonsensical, and theatrical tariff policies that raise prices on the people who can least afford it. What is not a hostile political act is telling American consumers exactly what the Trump tariffs will cost them.

Yet Karoline’s little snit made two important, if highly dishonest, points. First, she asserts that price increases caused by inflation (or in the case of egg prices, avian flu) are the same as tariffs, and ought to be treated that way. (They are not.) But the flip side of this is that inflation, which is complicated, multi-factorial, and (most importantly) often triggered by big events you can’t control is the same as tariffs—which are a strategy with predictable outcomes that you can control.

The point is: when Trump’s tariffs accelerate into a long-term economic disaster, it won’t be Trump’s fault, just like inflation wasn’t Biden’s fault (except that they keep saying that it was, but whatever.)

Karoline’s second point is even better: that by making Trump responsible for higher prices, which he is, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is acting as an operative of the Chinese Communist Party—which is obviously true. Why? Because why else would Amazon have made a deal in 2021 deal to market a volume of Xi Jinping's speeches and writings on Amazon.cn?

Xi’s book was, in fact, a staggering opportunity, which I too would have taken if I had known about it. The Chinese Communist Party has around 99 million members, and probably everyone is required to buy the book, so even if you only charged a dollar per book, you would make almost $100 million.

In any case, the fracas with Amazon is the latest chapter in the little dance that Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos have been doing since last fall. Surely someone in the Trump family, like Ivanka or Barron, understands why Bezos might legitimately feel that the relationship has been all give and no get. There was the $1 million gift to the Trump inauguration fund, tearing the Washington Post to bits in order to neuter the paper’s critical impact on the 2024 election and the incoming administration.

Then, there is the $40 million documentary/docuseries about Melania. Understood in context, it seems like a straight-out bribe. First, streaming services almost never pay for content up front: they pay creators fees based on how many subscribers view their work. Second, $40 million for 5-6 hours of TV is ridiculous. In 2018, when they were out of office, Netflix paid Barack and Michelle Obama $65 million up front for a production deal that stipulated multiple documentaries, movies, and series that would be made over a period of years: they have won multiple major awards for their work.

Let’s set the grifting aside, however, and return to why the Trump White House is so stressed about Amazon making the cost of tariffs visible to customers. Donald Trump honestly does not understand how tariffs work, and no one around him will tell him.

Trump supporters are invested in the idea that he is a genius, which I don’t think anyone who really knows him would say. Time and time again, he has revealed himself as an economically unsophisticated person whose only skill is selling his own image, telling lies, and sticking to those lies relentlessly. Trump’s other skill is promoting stupid ideas—ideas so very stupid that when he first hit the national scene, otherwise intelligent and sophisticated people would stand around scratching their heads and thinking: “Is it me, or is the Emperor walking down the street naked?”

One good example of this is Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to build a wall along the entire Mexican border that Mexico would pay for. Just prior to revealing this nugget of genius, he had met with the President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto. During their conversation the topic had never come up, much less Mexico forking over somewhere upwards of $21.6 billion for this very stupid idea.

How would Mexico pay for it? Trump’s plan—one that was broadly supported across the right-wing media sphere—was to tax remittances, the money that foreign workers send home to their families. In March 2017, Republican Representative Mike Rogers (AL-03) introduced the Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, which would have taxed all person-to-person wire transfers to Mexico, Central and Latin America, and the Caribbean at a rate of 2%. “An earlier proposal in the Senate, which didn't advance out of committee,” NPR reporter Jason Beaubien wrote, “would have placed a 7 percent `fine’ on remittances unless the sender can prove he or she is in the U.S. legally.” No legislation like this, which would have put myriad small businesses who specialize in remittance transfer in the position of taxing, fining, and demanding documentation from workers, ever passed.

It was a very stupid idea. But this episode alone fails to plumb the depths of how little Trump understood about what he was doing. At no point did the simple matter that relying on taxed remittances at the same time you were trying to deport the people sending those remittances was not a good plan for raising tens of billions of dollars. Nor was the backup idea: Throughout his administration, Trump asserted that the trade deals he was negotiating with Mexico and Canada would save the United States so much money that those funds would “indirectly” pay for the wall.

But that’s ok, because he didn’t build much wall. At the end of his first term, Trump claimed he had completed 400 miles of it, paid for by Mexico. The actual number was 242 miles, of which only 80 were new construction. The $15 billion that this boondoggle cost did not (obviously) come from Mexico either. It was diverted from the budgets of other federal departments.

Here’s the thing. Trumponomics is no different from anything else with the prefix Trump. It’s an illusion, obfuscated by word salad, lies, and the understanding that most Americans have no idea where money comes from or where it goes. Ordinary people on X, Cabinet members, and the right-wing media, skirt the obvious truth that Trump has no idea what he is doing by insisting that the reason you don’t understand Trump’s brilliance (for example, making Americans more prosperous by deliberately raising prices) is that he operates at a higher intellectual and strategic plane than normal mortals.

.Administration officials are, it seems, required to promote this illusion by engaging in constant public flattery. Take Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik who, when asked to report on tariff strategy at an April 10 Cabinet meeting, responded:

So, we have so many countries to talk to. It’s incredible, I think Scott [Bessent] and I, I’m not sure we could ever have enough time in the day to talk to all these countries because they want to talk and they want to talk now. And they have come with offers that they never ever, ever would have come with but for the moves that the President has made demanding that people treat the United States with respect. We’re getting the respect we deserve now. And I think you’re going to see historic yields one after the other. And then I’m very excited that within a week and a half, we’re going to start with the Gold Card. And the Trump Card is coming out, and we’re very excited about that. And that’s coming soon. So, very excited. Thank you very much.

“Good job,” Trump responded, before moving on to Linda McMahon’s report on her efforts to dismantle American higher education.

But who is surprised? Almost no one in Trump’s cabinet is qualified for the job they do, and I suspect most of them are deliberate fronts for zealots who do the real work behind the scenes. What is shocking, however, is when journalists, even those who we know are in the bag for MAGA, pretend to buy the “Trump as genius” story too. “Donald Trump’s admirers flatter him by saying he plays three-dimensional chess while his opponents play checkers,” Matthew Hennessey, a deputy editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, wrote in early March. “That’s silly. Mr. Trump’s game is poker, and he’s good at it.”

To be fair, this was before “Liberation Day,” after which we learned that Trump isn’t much of a poker player either.

Now we do. China has called Trump’s bluff repeatedly. They have done this directly and indirectly through surrogates in Silicon Valley, who persuaded the administration to carve out exceptions from punishing tariffs that would have doubled the cost of smartphones and electronic devices that the lives of nearly every American depend on. They claim not to be returning his phone calls.

And what was Jeff Bezos’s move—to let customers know specifically how much Trump is costing them, something that they cannot figure out themselves—but a way of calling Trump’s bluff?

Bluffs work in complicated ways. The matter was said to have been resolved in a telephone call between Trump and Bezos; an Amazon spokesperson denied that it had really been a plan. But the gambit achieved something, illustrating in a way Trump understands that, with a keystroke, Bezos could tell the truth: that Trump’s central assertion—consumers don’t pay tariffs, countries do—is false.

Can you convert to paid?

The story is already out there, should Amazon use its clout to tell it. Buried deep in CNN’s account of the fracas was this nugget: “Other e-commerce websites, like Shein and Temu, have said they implemented changes to their pricing due to the cost of tariffs. Temu has even introduced a new import charge that is displayed at checkout. Both companies source most of their products from China.”

Amazon’s bluff was primarily intended to escape blame for higher prices, however, but to set off alarm bells in the White House: tariffs are a broad threat to American domestic and international commerce. Everyone knows it but Donald Trump.

Tariffs of this magnitude and reach affect retailers large and small, and the danger goes beyond high prices: try empty shelves. “Typically, U.S. retailers would be ramping up their orders for two critical periods later this year: the fall back-to-school shopping season and the winter holidays,” Shannon Pettypiece wrote at NBC last week:

Some of the products likeliest to go missing from store shelves in the coming months will be lower-cost footwear, apparel, toys and electronics, for which manufacturing is heavily concentrated in China, Gold said. Other perishable items coming from China, like apple juice and fish, have limited shelf lives and were more difficult for retailers to stockpile.

But it is worse than that. If Amazon can absorb some of the cost temporarily, brick and mortar stores and the small businesses that sell through their site can’t. Store closures are inevitable because most proprietors can’t come up with tariff money they haven’t budgeted, or increase their sales volume to compensate for smaller profit margins. A retailer of pet goods “faces a $180,000 tariff bill from Customs and Border Protection” when a shipment of pet toys she could not cancel arrives in the United States and is taxed at 145%. A Portland, OR store owner who sells kids’ toys is looking at possible 20% price hikes for her customers; while a craft store owner explained that profit margins can’t get slimmer. “The margins that we work on now, pre-tariffs, are just barely enough to get us to pay the rent and pay for employees,” she told a reporter. “So, we will be doing some things like not rehiring."

What really happened in that call between Bezos and Trump? We can’t know. But what we do know is that the United States is on the brink of a cascading financial disaster unless someone cuts through the lies. Perhaps that phone call was a start.

Political Junkie

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