The Washington Post’s outgoing editor-at-large and longtime columnist has made explosive claims that its owner Jeff Bezos struck a deal with Donald Trump in order to kill the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Robert Kagan, who resigned from his position on Friday after more than two decades at the publication, told the Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives of Bezos’ Blue Origin space company the same day that the Amazon founder killed a plan to support Harris was proof of the backroom deal.
“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” he said on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
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The alleged collusion between Bezos and Trump, Kagan says, “is just the beginning,” adding that if the former president wins a second term, there will be “a lot of self censorship [in the media] and a lot of changing course just to be sure that they’re not going to be punished.”
Kagan became a vocal anti-Trump voice in 2016, writing about the dangers of authoritarianism in the event of a second Trump presidency, and about how the former president could jeopardize American democracy.
In 2023, Kagan warned about Trump’s potential influence on the media, saying, “Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”
Bezos knows first hand the consequences of criticizing the former president. The Post’s 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton is widely thought to have led to him losing out on a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract awarded by the Trump administration. And, throughout the former president’s first term, he repeatedly attacked Bezos and Amazon, accusing them of scamming the United States Postal Service.
“This is what we have to look forward to,” Kagan said. “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”
While the billionaire tech mogul did not buckle to Trump’s threats in years past, Kagan said that Bezos’ shock decision to pull the Harris endorsement had “obviously been in the works for some time,” describing his formerly hands-off approach to owning the Post as “a lot of Kabuki.”
“We now know what Bezos’ intention was, therefore we now know why he hired Will Lewis,” he continued. “We were the ones who were naive in thinking that there was anything else going on here.”
Lewis, who is the newspaper’s publisher, claimed that the Post’s last-minute nixing of its endorsement had nothing to do with its owner, and was instead because, “I do not believe in presidential endorsements.” His claim contradicts reports from sources that Lewis “fought tooth and nail” to keep the endorsement.
According to Kagan, “all the facts” lead in the direction of Bezos attempting to transform the Post into something akin to The Wall Street Journal, a center right “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” with Lewis by his side.
“Some journalists will stick around for that. Some will leave. If they leave, they can be replaced,” he said.
