President Donald Trump effusively praised Jeff Bezos’ makeover of The Washington Post during an interview on Sunday, a public turn from his past tirades against the Amazon founder over the paper’s reporting.
Trump said during an interview with Sinclair’s Sharyl Attkisson that he thought media outlets respected him more since his first term, though he didn’t think they had changed their approach to covering him.
He did concede that some tech companies—Facebook and Google, whose leaders stood next to him at the inauguration in January—had come around to him before singling out Bezos for how he was applying a conservative tilt to the Post.
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Bezos announced last month the Post‘s opinion section would focus on “free markets and personal liberties,” two traditional conservative values that he claimed were “underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.”
“A guy like Bezos, I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job,” Trump said. “Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with The Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before."
A spokesperson for Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A number of tech billionaires have made public entreaties to the president, with examples ranging from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg’s loosening of his platforms’ content moderation policies to OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s public about face on his character critiques of Trump. But Bezos has run the gamut on appealing to Trump’s sensibilities through personal outreaches and throughout his various companies, including the Post.
After years of Trump calling the paper the “Amazon Washington Post,” Bezos reached out to Trump shortly after the July assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, to praise how Trump composed himself after he was shot, according to Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt’s book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.
Bezos then killed the Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris before ending the practice entirely, rooting his reasoning in a lack of trust in the media.
He also cheered on Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in an X post after the election before dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago a month later. Amazon later donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and it has since shelled out roughly $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary and an undisclosed amount for the streaming rights to NBC’s The Apprentice.
Bezos’ Post announcement last month sparked outrage among Post staffers, leading to the resignation of its opinion editor and the spiking of at least two columns. Longtime columnist Ruth Marcus also resigned, bringing a column critical of Bezos’ decision to The New Yorker.
It’s a turn of fortunes for Bezos, who endured years of Trump’s attacks over the Post‘s coverage. Trump repeatedly complained about the paper’s coverage during his first term, labeling Bezos himself as “Jeff Bozo.” Amazon also accused the first Trump administration of denying contracts to the company in retaliation for the Post‘s work.
The paper’s then-publisher Fred Ryan defended itself and Bezos in a 2018 Post story, saying Bezos “has never intervened in a story” and had “not directed or proposed editorials or endorsements.”
But Bezos' recent changes seem to have curried favor with Trump, who told The Spectator last month that he dined with Bezos the night of the paper’s opinion changes.
