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In February 2017, for the first time in its long history, the Washington Post adopted an official slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The motto was a little bit much. Pompous and self-important, it sounded as if the newspaper was really trying to say Without the Washington Post, we’re all screwed. At the time, plenty of rival news outlets—including Slate—ribbed the Post for its portentousness. Democracy Dies in Darkness. OK, guys. Thank God we’ve got George Will to keep the lamps lit for us.
And yet, in the years that followed, the Post more or less lived up to the slogan’s implied mandate: to shine a bright light on an ethically bankrupt president and his clown-car administration. Under the editorial leadership of ex–Boston Globe chief Marty Baron and the financial stewardship of its owner, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, the Post excelled during the first Trump administration, buoyed by a tide of subscribers eager to have Donald Trump’s feet held to the fire. From 2016 through 2021, the newspaper turned out lots of great journalism that illuminated the depths of Trump’s self-dealing. From David Fahrenthold’s coverage of Trump’s alleged charitable giving to the paper’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the Post rose to its own challenge and generated what was arguably the newspaper’s best body of work since the Watergate era.
The Post’s keen focus on Trump and his many lickspittles wasn’t just a case of “Trump derangement syndrome.” It was an editorial strategy that was required by a historic moment. The president’s unfitness for office was the era’s most important story, and as D.C.’s hometown newspaper, the Post was obliged to cover it from every possible angle. For Bezos, it surely didn’t hurt that this editorial strategy also made good business sense: In 2019, CNN reported that “the Post went from hemorrhaging advertising revenue to becoming a profitable business in 2016, and continuing to be profitable not just in 2017, but also in 2018.” Trump left town in disgrace in January 2021, seemingly bound for an ignominious retirement. In his inauguration speech, Trump’s successor, “Amtrak” Joe Biden, announced that “democracy had prevailed.” It had, albeit briefly—and by shining its light so vividly for so long on Trump and his cronies, the Post deserved a small share of the credit.
Times have changed. It is now 2025, Trump is back in office, and Washington Post readers are learning to their horror that darkness isn’t the only condition under which democracy can die. Sometimes, it also dies at the hands of people like Jeff Bezos: pragmatic oligarchs with diversified business portfolios who ultimately care less about defending democracy than about not losing money by doing so. For the past year or so, and certainly ever since it became clear that the Democrats were waging an uphill battle in the 2024 presidential election, Bezos has been conspicuously remaking the Post into an entity that seems primarily focused on not antagonizing Donald Trump. In the process, he has hollowed out the editorial staff and squandered the journalistic legacy that makes the Washington Post worth owning and operating in the first place.
On Wednesday, various outlets reported that Bezos had informed Post staffers that the newspaper’s opinion section would thenceforth be focusing on “personal liberty and free markets.” Claiming that the internet had obviated the daily newspaper’s previous responsibility to offer “a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos argued that “free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” and that he was excited for Post Opinion to focus on those topics going forward—as opposed to, you know, the jackbooted horrors of the second Trump administration. (“Bravo, @JeffBezos!” wrote Elon Musk on the website formerly known as Twitter.)
The announcement was just the latest humiliating turn in the newspaper’s depressing recent narrative of ownership-driven decline. In 2023, amid a reported $77 million loss, the paper shed hundreds of jobs through a combination of layoffs and buyouts, which may have saved Bezos some money, but which also inevitably affected the paper’s ability to produce the sort of wide-ranging, high-quality journalism that made it worth reading in the first place. In 2024, to help turn the paper’s financial tide, Bezos installed some nitwit from Great Britain as publisher, who buzzed in with a bunch of stupid ideas about newsroom reorganization; drove off the paper’s relatively new editor in chief, Sally Buzbee; and attempted to stop the Post from covering his own alleged involvement in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
In October of last year, under Bezos’ direct instructions, the Post editorial board refrained from endorsing a presidential candidate, a cowardly decision that led a quarter-million Post readers to cancel their subscriptions. In January, the New York Times reported that the Post had internally debuted a new motto, one that was much less strident than its public-facing slogan: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” The All in that motto tells the tale, with its tacit implication that the newspaper’s previous focus on carefully reported and argued stories and columns that reflected poorly on Donald Trump was only for part of America—the liberal part.
Bezos’ unilateral remaking of the Post’s opinion section this week—the section’s editor, David Shipley, resigned upon receiving the mandate, and he really had no other choice—is of a piece with all these other moves. Taken together, it starts to seem clear that, for Bezos, the Post has become a pawn in a much larger game. I don’t think that Bezos is neutering the Post because he’s suddenly gone full MAGA, or because he honestly believes that the newspaper’s ideal editorial strategy involves driving away its best reporters and columnists while mimicking the worst parts of CNN and the Wall Street Journal. I think he’s making moves with an eye toward mollifying an intensely vindictive president and thus improving the near-term fate of his other, much more prominent business ventures.
If the Post had a different, less flush owner, maybe you could be swayed by any of the woe-is-us C-suite wailing about the newspaper’s plummeting revenue, subscription, and traffic numbers. But Bezos has long been on the short list of the wealthiest people in human history, and he could afford to underwrite an optimal version of the Post in perpetuity and never notice a dent in his $220 billion personal fortune. He could, right now, choose to run the Post the way that Steve Cohen chooses to run the New York Mets: by throwing so much money at top talent that they can’t afford to not work there. (I myself do not fall into the “top editorial talent” category, but I would nevertheless gladly accept utility infielder money to step in and write occasional columns when the good reporters need days off.)
This sort of benevolent stewardship was what lots of people hoped for when Bezos bought the Post from the storied Graham family in 2013, and by now it is unfortunately clear that Bezos has other ambitions. (The Graham Holdings Company owns Slate.) Given how his recent meddling has sunk the Post’s financial position even deeper, it’s hard to believe Bezos’ goal is really to get the Post to pay for itself. The Post doesn’t need to pay for itself as long as Bezos is around to pay for it; and even if it did, it’s hard to see how alienating existing customers while pandering to the sorts of people who hate the Washington Post is a viable long-term strategy. I think it’s more that Bezos is bent on ensuring that the Post’s political coverage does not endanger the profit potential of any of his other businesses.
The Washington Post is a minor, minor component of Bezos’ business portfolio. Much more central to the billionaire’s past, present, and future fortune are the world-devouring Amazon.com and his spaceflight startup, Blue Origin. Trump’s return to office alongside the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Bezos and his other businesses. As Trump and Musk hollow out the federal government, they are leaving behind a massive void that will inevitably be filled by private industry. Services once provided by humans will start to be provided by A.I., a field in which Amazon has already invested billions. If the U.S. Postal Service is gutted, it will create additional opportunities for companies like Amazon with worldwide logistics infrastructures; if NASA and the Pentagon shrink, there’ll be more money to funnel to private contractors such as Blue Origin.
The cuts that Musk and the Trump Cabinet are making represent a potential windfall for Bezos and his businesses—assuming, of course, that he’s able to stay on Trump’s good side. Robustly covering the many terrible things happening in the second Trump administration is a great way to get and stay on Trump’s bad side, though, and in order to understand why Bezos seems to be deliberately ruining the Washington Post, you need to view the changes he’s making there through that transactional lens. If Bezos plays nice with Trump by refocusing the Post’s coverage away from his administration, then maybe Trump’s Federal Trade Commission might even wind down its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. If the Post were to double down on its prior hard coverage of the Trump administration, though, Bezos might end up frozen out of the private-industry gold rush that’s soon to come, and might have to keep dealing with antitrust suits for years.
There’s a world of difference between the first Trump administration and the second, as we’re all now aware. Eight years ago, normal people were mostly shocked and angry that America elected such a narcissistic, incompetent boob to the presidency—and most of America’s business leaders chose to cater to this righteous anger. The Trump administration felt like a historical aberration, and thus there was no real business reason to normalize or collaborate with it. Today, though, the “resistance” is tapped out, the boobs are in ascendance, and Trumpism is no longer an aberration. Instead, it’s an opportunity space for Bezos, and Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and all the other craven big-money chickenshits to whom democracy only ever mattered as part of a marketing slogan. They will gladly help set the world on fire as long as they can bid on the contract to clear the debris.
