Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary is just the beginning
Sometimes, the medium is indeed the message. When the just-announced Melania Trump documentary comes out later this year, for instance, it will likely be less known for its content than for where people are watching it: on Amazon Prime Video. If Amazon’s streaming service were merely carrying the film as one of the myriad titles it shuffles in and out each month, chances are it wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. The project will arrive, however, as an Amazon Studios original, with the company reportedly also splashing out on a theatrical run. (Melania Trump herself is credited as an executive producer, and the film is being directed by Brett Ratner, a former Hollywood hitmaker who has been on hiatus since six women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2017.) While it may mark Amazon’s first toe-dip into MAGA-friendly pop culture, this deal is just the latest example of tech execs like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos openly ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump as he returns to the White House. It might only be the beginning. The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, made an unexpected step in the waning days of the election. It declined to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades. Although the reasoning Bezos offered to support the decision—that such endorsements “create a perception of bias”—is difficult to argue, the eleventh-hour timing of the announcement ruffled some feathers. In his first term, Trump regularly railed against the newspaper (and its owner) over unflattering coverage, calling it “The Amazon Washington Post,” so Bezos’s move was viewed by some as capitulation. As former editor of The Post Marty Baron wrote on X: “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).” If Bezos, who Trump once referred to as “Jeff Bozo” is concerned with looking intimidated by the president-elect, he isn’t acting like it. He has donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, dined with Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago, and reports feeling “very optimistic” about the second Trump administration. He’s not the only one, either. Tech and media CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pinchai, have all reportedly met with Trump—and Zuckerberg and Altman also donated to the inauguration fund. Like Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also ordered his newspaper to refrain from endorsing a candidate, squashing an editorial that had already been written. And also like Bezos, Soon-Shiong has signaled an interest in distributing MAGA-friendly media, reportedly meeting with former SNL comedian Rob Schneider about creating an all-female talk show to serve as “the opposite” of The View. It’s quite a turnaround for Bezos, though, who described himself as Trump’s “perceived political enemy” in 2019, when the Department of Defense under Trump awarded Amazon Web Services rival Microsoft a $10 billion contract to put sensitive data on a cloud server. Going back further, Bezos once condemned candidate Trump in 2016 for attacking the media. “One of the things that makes this country as amazing as it is,” Bezos said at the time, “is that we are allowed to criticize and scrutinize our elected leaders.” Whether Bezos still feels that way is unclear. Last Friday, longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the paper after an editor allegedly rejected a critical sketch of hers over its point of view. The cartoon in question depicted a handful of CEOs, including one recognizable as Bezos, kneeling at the altar of Trump, offering large bags of cash. “As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote in her newsletter. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job.” (Thanks to the Streisand Effect, whereby suppression of information only helps it travel further, Telnaes’s cartoon went viral in a way it otherwise might not have. If that exposure weren’t enough, Telnaes later shared the work of several other political cartoonists depicting the same concept as her scrapped piece in a follow-up newsletter.) So, what might have taken Bezos in less than a decade from chiding Trump’s aversion to criticism, to allegedly shielding both Trump and himself from it? Only Bezos knows for sure, but the obvious answer would be a desire to avoid spending the next four years in an adversarial relationship with the president. While Trump has a reputation for being susceptible to flattery and demonstrations of loyalty, he is also known for seeking retribution against perceived slights in media and otherwise. Just recently, he filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer over “election interference” in the form of an unflattering poll. It’s the kind of action that seems designed to scare other public figures away from finding out what else Trump might consider inter
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Sometimes, the medium is indeed the message. When the just-announced Melania Trump documentary comes out later this year, for instance, it will likely be less known for its content than for where people are watching it: on Amazon Prime Video.
If Amazon’s streaming service were merely carrying the film as one of the myriad titles it shuffles in and out each month, chances are it wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. The project will arrive, however, as an Amazon Studios original, with the company reportedly also splashing out on a theatrical run. (Melania Trump herself is credited as an executive producer, and the film is being directed by Brett Ratner, a former Hollywood hitmaker who has been on hiatus since six women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2017.) While it may mark Amazon’s first toe-dip into MAGA-friendly pop culture, this deal is just the latest example of tech execs like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos openly ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump as he returns to the White House. It might only be the beginning.
The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, made an unexpected step in the waning days of the election. It declined to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades. Although the reasoning Bezos offered to support the decision—that such endorsements “create a perception of bias”—is difficult to argue, the eleventh-hour timing of the announcement ruffled some feathers. In his first term, Trump regularly railed against the newspaper (and its owner) over unflattering coverage, calling it “The Amazon Washington Post,” so Bezos’s move was viewed by some as capitulation. As former editor of The Post Marty Baron wrote on X: “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).”
If Bezos, who Trump once referred to as “Jeff Bozo” is concerned with looking intimidated by the president-elect, he isn’t acting like it. He has donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, dined with Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago, and reports feeling “very optimistic” about the second Trump administration.
He’s not the only one, either.
Tech and media CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pinchai, have all reportedly met with Trump—and Zuckerberg and Altman also donated to the inauguration fund. Like Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also ordered his newspaper to refrain from endorsing a candidate, squashing an editorial that had already been written. And also like Bezos, Soon-Shiong has signaled an interest in distributing MAGA-friendly media, reportedly meeting with former SNL comedian Rob Schneider about creating an all-female talk show to serve as “the opposite” of The View.
It’s quite a turnaround for Bezos, though, who described himself as Trump’s “perceived political enemy” in 2019, when the Department of Defense under Trump awarded Amazon Web Services rival Microsoft a $10 billion contract to put sensitive data on a cloud server.
Going back further, Bezos once condemned candidate Trump in 2016 for attacking the media.
“One of the things that makes this country as amazing as it is,” Bezos said at the time, “is that we are allowed to criticize and scrutinize our elected leaders.”
Whether Bezos still feels that way is unclear. Last Friday, longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the paper after an editor allegedly rejected a critical sketch of hers over its point of view. The cartoon in question depicted a handful of CEOs, including one recognizable as Bezos, kneeling at the altar of Trump, offering large bags of cash.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote in her newsletter. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job.” (Thanks to the Streisand Effect, whereby suppression of information only helps it travel further, Telnaes’s cartoon went viral in a way it otherwise might not have. If that exposure weren’t enough, Telnaes later shared the work of several other political cartoonists depicting the same concept as her scrapped piece in a follow-up newsletter.)
So, what might have taken Bezos in less than a decade from chiding Trump’s aversion to criticism, to allegedly shielding both Trump and himself from it? Only Bezos knows for sure, but the obvious answer would be a desire to avoid spending the next four years in an adversarial relationship with the president. While Trump has a reputation for being susceptible to flattery and demonstrations of loyalty, he is also known for seeking retribution against perceived slights in media and otherwise. Just recently, he filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer over “election interference” in the form of an unflattering poll. It’s the kind of action that seems designed to scare other public figures away from finding out what else Trump might consider interference.
While the CEOs of companies like Meta, Airbnb, and Dropbox all spoke out against Trump’s “travel ban” in January 2017, which introduced sweeping restrictions on those flying into or out of seven predominantly Muslim countries, new disincentives have since emerged around doing anything similar again. In recent years, conservative leaders beyond Trump have mobilized against companies weighing in on political matters—as when Disney criticized Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and the Governor retaliated. Elsewhere, former CEO Vivek Ramaswamy entered the political realm by writing an entire book about “Corporate America’s social justice scam,” and he now has Trump’s ear as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency task force.
Whether CEOs like Bezos are genuinely excited about Trump’s “energy around reducing regulation” or just afraid of his wrath, they seem convinced that staying neutral is no longer enough to stay on his good side. With inauguration two weeks away, MAGA-friendliness has become the new neutrality. What remains to be seen, though, is how many Melania documentaries and Rob Schneider talk shows is considered MAGA-friendly enough.
