Campus PC is out of control

I dunno, but the president saying that he would retaliate against the owners of the Washington Post for unfavorable coverage and then doing it by denying it a huge government contract seems like an important story!

By 2016 Trump had gone from implicitly threatening to harm Amazon’s interests to threatening this explicitly. “If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned, presciently, in February 2016. A few months later, Sean Hannity asked about critical reporting in the Post. Trump’s response was telling. He weaved back and forth between denouncing the Post and denouncing Amazon, treating the two as interchangeable…

[…]

Guy Snodgrass, a former speechwriter to Defense Secretary James Matthis, writes in his new book that in the summer of 2018, Trump ordered Mattis to “screw Amazon” by denying it the contract. Snodgrass records that Mattis pushed back on this request. And it is common for Trump or his advisers to consider wild, dangerous, or criminal schemes they ultimately don’t follow through on. Yet the fact is that the Pentagon did deny Amazon the cloud-computing contract after what the New York Times called a “highly unusual, last-minute intervention by President Trump.” And that denial came as a shock to analysts, who considered Amazon the prohibitive favorite to win the bid. The firm is the country’s largest cloud provider and had already built a cloud for the CIA.

On their face, the publicly reported facts of this case lay out a gigantic scandal. The president intervened to deny a federal contract to a firm he publicly and privately vowed to punish because its owner also owns a newspaper whose coverage angered him. The most generous possible interpretation of these facts is that Trump somehow came to believe some merit-based reason to deny Amazon the contract. But this scenario would presuppose that Trump is able to ignore his intense personal animus toward a principal figure in the dispute and form a judgment abstracted from his political interests — the kind of thinking even Trump’s defenders would largely concede he is almost incapable of.

And even this virtually-unimaginable scenario would still amount to a massive abuse of power. After all, Trump has vowed retribution against Bezos over the Post’s coverage, and then delivered a punishing blow to his firm. His actions made the threat credible. Everybody will at least suspectTrump engineered the Pentagon decision to hurt Bezos. Any owner of an independent media who publishes journalism that runs against Trump’s interests will have to fear weigh his ability to exact a financial price. Media owners are not universally brave and willing to absorb massive financial hits in order to preserve the independence of their journalism.

I mean, I’m not saying it rises to the level of “a student at Oberlin saying that you shouldn’t call a pulled pork sandwich a banh mi” or anything, but it seems pretty bad.