Why Trump attacks on Amazon will immunize the tech giant from regulation
Instead of taking to Twitter to voice his frustration and concerns with Amazon, President Donald Trump should have privately gone to Republican and Democratic senators to garner bipartisan support to use antitrust laws in order to break up the e-commerce behemoth, Scott Galloway, a business professor at New York University said.
“The president’s actions have effectively immunized Amazon from regulation, because he’s turned it into a partisan issue,” Galloway told FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on Wednesday. “It’s now seen as a personal attack against [Jeff] Bezos and the [Washington] Post.”
Trump accused the e-commerce behemoth of putting brick-and-mortar retailers out of business, and criticized it for delivering packages via the U.S. Postal Service. He warned that Amazon should pay those shipping costs, instead of requiring the beleaguered government entity to do so.
But some have suggested Trump’s attacks are actually because of the unfavorable coverage of him in The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos. That alone could protect the Cupertino, California-based company, Galloway said, warning that it could force initial critics of Amazon -- like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- to protect the tech giant on merit.
“If he was serious about this, he would’ve make the argument against all of big tech, and he would’ve privately gone to some Democratic and Republican senators and made it a bipartisan issue,” he said. “The place to go gangster on these guys is through red state [attorneys general]. That’s what he should’ve done.”
Instead, Trump launched into a Twitter crusade against Amazon, berating it for not paying state taxes while simultaneously wasting taxpayers’ dollars. But the data Trump is using -- Amazon did pay state taxes, Galloway said -- is faulty, and therefore hinders the president’s argument.
“He comes across as uniformed, using weak data. And then there’s Jeff Bezos in the background feeding the president data to refute everything the president’s said,” Galloway said. “One of them is acting presidential, the other is president. He has blown it.”
