United States president, Donald Trump has continued his recent attacks on Amazon. Trump said that he is going to address what he called unfair business advantages of online retailer Amazon.com Inc. Trump stated this to reporters while traveling back to Washington DC from West Virginia aboard Air Force One. He accused Amazon of not operating on a level playing field and not paying enough sales tax.
When asked by newsmen if he wanted to make policy changes related to Amazon, Trump said: “We’re going to take a very serious look at that. He added that ”the “sales tax situation” was going to be looked at soon by the Supreme Court.
The comments followed a tweet earlier in the day. In Trump’s earlier tweet he labeled the Washington Post as the “chief lobbyist” for Amazon. According to Reuters, his lobbying allegations repeated a previous unsubstantiated attack on the newspaper, while White House officials in recent days have said no policy changes related to the company were currently planned.
On Thursday, he took issue with a headline in the Post on China retaliating with trade penalties against U.S. products. “The Fake News Washington Post, Amazon’s ‘chief lobbyist,’ has another (of many) phony headlines,” Trump said on Twitter.
Martin Baron, the Washington Post’s executive editor, rejected the accusation. “There isn’t anybody here who is paid by Amazon,” Baron told the New York Times in a report published on Tuesday. “Not one penny,” Baron said.
In his recent onslaught against the online retailer, Trump has repeatedly attacked their use of the United States Postal Service, claiming it is losing money on delivering the company’s packages. In his He repeated the claim on Thursday while speaking to reporters;
“The Post Office is not doing well with Amazon,” He said.
Meanwhile, presidents recent fight against the company has not helped t, the company’s shares have witnessed a depreciation in its price due to a reason many claim to be related to fears of new government policies that could affect the company.
Amazon shares closed up 2.9 percent on Thursday but dipped slightly after the market closed following the latest Trump comments. Before Thursday’s trading, the stock had dropped 4 percent since news website Axios reported last week that Trump was obsessed with Amazon and wanted to curb its power, possibly with anti-trust action.
In a related development, a case to be argued on April 17, South Dakota is asking the nine justices to overturn a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that only companies with a physical presence in a state are required to collect the state’s sales tax on purchases. The Justice Department filed a brief in support of South Dakota, which lost in lower courts.
For now, Amazon is not involved in the case but from all indications, eventual outcome could have consequences for them and other e-commerce businesses. Amazon has already agreed to collect sales taxes in all 45 states that impose them on items it sells directly.
How do you think this is going to end? Will this affect the status of Jef Bezos, the founder of Amazon as the richest man on earth?