The powerful people that Kowtowed to Donald Trump. | The News Agents

You talk about Bezos, yeah, you know, I would say probably it's a slam dunk. What has happened with him, where he was in the first term, where he is in the second term, the repositioning of the Washington Post, which he owns as well as Amazon, just before the election to say it wasn't going to support any candidate, which was a big statement from a liberal newspaper. What do you think the impulses there were? Was that just about, look, I've run a big company, I want to make money. my space company depends on Donald Trump and government contracts, therefore I better suck up to it. It's especially stark with Bezos because he was courageous in the first term as owner of the Washington Post but he was, Trump punished him he took an enormous government contract away from Amazon, a Pentagon cloud computing contract it was a 10 billion dollar contract and Bezos held firm I really admired him in the first term and then in the second term, just the opposite I mean, even before Trump was sworn in He was reining in the Washington Post, as you say, shutting down its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, paying, let's say, an uneconomic price for the Melania Trump documentary, which ended up putting $28 million, at least, in Melania's pocket. And you sort of think, well, what happened? Did he just wake up one day and say, you know, this democracy thing isn't working out so well, let's try dictatorship? No, I don't think so. I think he had something very particular to protect, which is his interest in space exploration. And I think by the second term, he was losing out his company, space company Blue Origin, was losing out to Elon Musk's company, SpaceX. That business depends completely, almost completely, on government contracts with the Pentagon and NASA to put satellites in orbit. And this is the thing that if you look back at his biography, he's cared about most since he was a child. And I think he saw that that dream jeopardize. I detect a streak of puritanism in you about the way people should behave and the moral standards by which they should be judged. And isn't it the experience that if you are in public life, it's complicated. You have to deal with the president who is there at the time. But you kind of think, you know what, in two years time, three years time, he'll be gone and hopefully it will be someone better. And then we can go back to a more normal way of operating. But I can't jeopardize everything about what I'm doing. Well, when you have a president who tries to bully people in the way Trump does, it gives him a tremendous amount of power if you start from the premise that the only option is to accommodate him in some way. But it's interesting what you say, John, about puritanism or compromise. Compromise is the essence of politics in ordinary times and in ordinary situations. I don't denigrate it or dislike it at all. But there's ordinary compromise and there's extraordinary compromise. And the extraordinary compromise has to do with these core principles.