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Bezos’ Endorsement Gambit Backfires: Trump Files FEC Complaint Against WaPo

Stupidity

from the can-we-stop-the-stupidity? dept

Mon, Nov 4th 2024 01:02pm -

Donald Trump just took his war on the free press to a new level of absurdity, filing an FEC complaint against the Washington Post for — wait for it — promoting its own reporting. Apparently, Bezos’ attempt to appease the MAGA crowd with his endorsement cop-out didn’t do the trick.

We had warned Jeff Bezos that his decision to capitulate-in-advance and block the Washington Post from publishing a Kamala Harris endorsement would lead Trump to push for even more. And now it’s here. The complaint claims that the WaPo’s decision to run ads promoting its reporting was “illegal corporate in-kind contributions” to Harris’ campaign.

Really.

And, yes, we just covered another of Donald Trump’s blatant attacks on the First Amendment with his crazy lawsuit against CBS over how it edited a 60 Minutes interview that the show did with Harris. But this story is more about Bezos, and the utter stupidity of thinking that capitulating to Trump and blocking the endorsement would magically make the MAGA world “trust” the Washington Post.

The FEC complaint is ridiculous on multiple levels. The crux of his complaint is based on a report in Semafor, that the Washington Post was doing paid promotion of some of its articles about the campaign, and tended to promote “neutral” stories about Harris, but “critical” stories about Trump. Really.

The Washington Post recently announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate, a decision the Post’s owner defended on the basis that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.”

Yet, on October 30, 2024, the news website Semafor published a report titled “Washington Post pays to boost stories critical of Trump as subscribers flee.” The Semafor article discloses that, starting “on Monday,” October 28, 2024—just over a week before Election Day—The Washington Post has “aggressively ramped up its paid advertising campaign, boosting dozens of articles related to the election.”

As Semafor reported, this is no simple commercial marketing campaign.: “While the [Post] articles about Vice President Kamala Harris were relatively neutral in tone”—if not flattering—“and focused on her … digital strategy, her policy proposals, and her chances of winning …, the articles that the Post paid to highlight about [President] Trump told a different story.” In fact, Semafor reported, the Washington Post has paid to “boost[] multiple critical articles” of President Trump through this sudden, last-minute advertising campaign.

So, yeah, he’s now trying to make a thing about the Washington Post’s decisions on what articles it’s promoting through advertising. The simple reality is that the Post is advertising the kinds of stories it thinks will get the most attention. That some of those are about how Donald Trump is out of his mind isn’t on the Post. It’s on him.

This is all even more stupid given that Donald Trump himself claimed that the Washington Post’s non-endorsement was really an endorsement for Trump himself.

“The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers. They’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying – because they only endorse Democrats – they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it,” he said.

Once again, this is an example of Donald Trump trying to punish anyone who says anything negative about him, betraying his willingness to suppress speech that he doesn’t like.

But, at the same time, it should be a loud siren for those thinking that they, too, will capitulate-in-advance. It won’t magically make MAGA folks trust you or like you. They will only continue the attack and ask for more and more. Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense.

Bezos’ initial step towards that didn’t help. It only encouraged Trump to push for more.

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79 Comments
This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re:

Trump has already blamed everyone from other Republicans to mainstream media outlets for “rigging” and “stealing” this election from him. He did the same thing in 2020 and 2016. He knows what he’s doing.

The post-election bullshit parade of 2020, culminating with the insurrection on the 6th of January 2021, was a failed coup. But it was also a test run for a more successful coup plot. Trump is far more ready to pull it off this time than he was last time, and he’s counting on his supporters⁠—both inside and outside the government⁠—to help him pull it off.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

“But it was also a test run for a more successful coup plot. Trump is far more ready to pull it off this time than he was last time, and he’s counting on his supporters⁠—both inside and outside the government⁠—to help him pull it off.”
stop saying that it’s going to succeed

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:

Or else what?

That besides: I didn’t say it would ultimately succeed, only that it would be more successful than the prior coup attempt. Trump has enough friendly judges in place⁠—including the three judges he put on the Supreme Court⁠—that any legal action his campaign takes could find some measure of success. And we know his followers will be more than ready to take up arms if he so much as implies that they should. The chances of a coup actually succeeding are low, but they are never zero, not even in the United States.

And if you don’t like me saying that: tough shit. I’m not rooting for a coup, but I can acknowledge reality. You won’t⁠—and can’t!⁠—stop me from doing that.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2

It seems like there’s less in trump’s favor now than in 2020: he paved a trail of legal failures back then and the judges are the same. Plus he’s not currently president, so the official illegal acts out isn’t available. There’s also been a smattering of election law changes and the “independent state legislature” doctrine just got rejected again by the SC.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5

You can’t be sure of that. Trump has been trying hard to get the “bro vote” on his side these past few months, since he knows he’s got a problem with women voters. And conservative men are far more likely to both own multiple firearms and be the kind of people who would use those firearms to “defend” the country from “cheaters”. You can think there couldn’t be another coup attempt, but considering the 6th of January 2021 in connection with the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, I believe there could be another attempt to install Trump in the White House even if he didn’t win the election. I’m not saying it would be successful⁠—I’m saying it’s possible that it could both happen and be at least slightly more successful than the last attempt.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:6

Regardless of the precise number of gun nuts, you can take it to the bank that Biden will call out the National Guard to backstop the on-site police efforts at presenting a force large enough to stymie the most intense efforts to overthrow the perfunctory reading of the Electoral College results. In point of fact, this “event” is all decorum, the actual turn-over of power (speaking as from a future viewpoint) has already been decided, and the results have already been made public, so Trump would have to have the USSC step in actually declare that he (Trump) is the new Dictator-For-Life, and that Harris is nothing more than grist for the revenge-mill that Trump will gin up.

Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Even the most recalcitrant Justices on the Court realize that the populace won’t stand for that ruling. And they also realize, as should we here on TD, that so-called “gun nuts” are political-party-agnostic. More than a ‘few’ of us Democrats also own guns, and we also served in the military. That gives us a leg-up on what to do and when to do it, compared to the rabble that can’t even spell stupid, let alone recognize that they are such.

As noted by several people higher up on the food chain than me, “If you wouldn’t buy a used car from this man, why in the world would you want him to be our President?!”

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

If it does succeed, it’ll be because there’s too many dumb little shits like you who want to pretend that god is in his heaven and therefore all is right with the world.

Just keep to Reddit where you can stay in your echo chamber where nothing is wrong and fascism hasn’t been on the rise for the past 2 decades at least little one.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: 

import random
import time

phrases = [
    "Your every accusation is a confession.",
    "[grumble grumble Techdirt grumble grumble]",
    "[complete non sequitur]",
    "what's wrong I thought you guys loved...",
    "[bitching about Toom]",
    "[complaint about moderation practices]",
    "Haha, I enjoy making you angry!",
    "American Liberals [grumble grumble]",
    "[complaint about people calling out trolls]"
]

def mattbot_comment():
        for _ in range(5): 
        print(random.choice(phrases))
        time.sleep(1) 

mattbot_comment()

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Koby (profile) says:

Pay 2 Win

For years now, newspapers have been complaining that they need a new and sustainable revenue model. Perhaps this is it! Instead of a link tax, or a subscriber model, shills can pay money to boost their favored stories. And then pay even more to bury news favorable to the opposition. Those with the most money can directly push the news narrative onto independents.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Arianity says:

Trump is a disgusting pile of trash, but it is really funny how he always turns on people who help him. People just lining up to get their faces eaten by leopards, after watching the previous guy get his face eaten, daily. It would be funnier if we weren’t stuck in the same boat with these idiots.

Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense.

And then he’ll still throw it under the bus the moment his whims feel like it.

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That One Guy (profile) says:

Who could have ever seen that coming?

Bezos: But I voiced my support for the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces party!

While convicted felon Trump’s attack on the press is disgusting and should be enough to prevent anyone who cares the slightest about the first amendment or free speech from supporting him I have to say there is more than a little schadenfreude to be found in watching the gutless coward Bezos attempt to appease said convicted felon only to immediately have his face on the menu like this.

“The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers. They’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying – because they only endorse Democrats – they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it,” he said.

And the cowardice of the american press comes home to roost. They sanewashed his words and actions, treated him as a reasonable person and candidate with positions that deserved to be respected, bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt and it got them… ‘Unless you explicitly support my opponent that means you support me and want to see me elected.’

I’d call it a risky gambit on his part as claiming a fraudulent endorsement already blew up in his face once before but this late in the game and given who he’s talking about? It’s probably a fairly safe lie as they’re not likely to do anything in response.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Ethin Probst (profile) says:

Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense.

I doubt that MAGA world will be satisfied even then. I doubt they even know what satisfaction is. Even if WaPo were to cease ti exist they still wouldn’t be satisfied.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

That’s correct: they’ll never be satisfied. MAGA is, in every real sense, a nihilist death cult. They’re willing to kill everyone, including themselves, as long as they can exercise their racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and their absolute hatred of literacy, knowledge, education, and science…until the last moment.

There’s no “satisfying” people like this because they can’t be satisfied. There’s no horror they won’t unleash, no line they won’t cross. Hillary Clinton was right when she called them “deplorables”, but that’s far too mild a term. They’re killers — psychotic, sadistic killers — and they’ve already proved it.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

Conservatives can and do definitely co-exist with rational people.

People who proudly wave the GOP flag and want Trump to be elected, thinking he’ll be a responsible conservative leader?

Well, they’re either severely brainwashed, living in an echo chamber, or lying, and are already trying to not co-exist with rational people.

Nothing wrong with people being conservative, fiscally or socially. Society needs conservatives AND progressives to have healthy feedback loops.

The people currently hiding behind the Conservative label in the US have already shown that they’re fiscally and socially regressive, not conservative. They don’t want to preserve any of what currently exists; they want to throw it all out, along with anyone not like them, to replace it with a fiction that never has, and never can exist.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3

“sadly only center or near center will ever get this”

There is no left, only center, right and right wing extremist.

“Society needs conservatives AND progressives to have healthy feedback loops.”

Yesterday’s conservatives have morphed into today’s right wing extremist. Some of yesterday’s conservatives have not completely lost their minds but they are few in numbers.

A healthy feedback loop would not look like today’s GOP rallies. Not sure what they are feeding back but it looks unstable.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2

Society needs conservatives AND progressives to have healthy feedback loops.

You know what’s hilarious about this statement? Only liberals and Democrats would ever say it. Hell, Kamala effectively said it in this election cycle. But you know who hasn’t said that? Donald Trump. And that’s because you’ll never hear a conservative/Republican say this about a liberal/Democrat lawmaker unless that Republican has no viable political future.

The people currently hiding behind the Conservative label in the US have already shown that they’re fiscally and socially regressive, not conservative. They don’t want to preserve any of what currently exists; they want to throw it all out, along with anyone not like them, to replace it with a fiction that never has, and never can exist.

If conservatives are about preserving the status quo, what specific status quo do you think U.S. conservatives want to preserve when you have the leader of the party openly opining during his campaign “speeches” about taking the country back to a year when slavery was legal and women couldn’t vote?

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

You forget: claiming (in Trump’s case, whining) election interference is NOT the same thing as having actually interfered with an election. As with all other lawsuits involving Trump, he will lose this one too.

Or haven’t you noticed that he’s been scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time, trying to find attorneys that can actually pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat?

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Anonymous Coward says:

” Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense” — Right now most of the media is left wing propaganda nonsense which is why legacy media isn’t trusted anymore. Most of them have lost their minds since 2016. They went entirely too far with the bias, the rhetoric, and the lies they constantly tell. I think the Russia hoax hurt them the most. Ever since then, it’s been down hill

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Kinetic Gothic says:

Re:

When it comes to “bias, rhetoric and lies being constantly told”, the mainstream media, is sitting at the bar watching right wing media’s beer steins while OANN, Newsmax, Fox, and indys like Dinesh D’sousa, Alex Jones and Stew Peters, put on a world class three ring circus show with their constellation of persecution fantasies.

It’s almost a given that when some right winger claims the mainstream media is lying, they’re then going to point a demonstrably less trustworthy source as their source.

But hey… the hypocrisy works for the right, Trump has pretty much sewn up the Flat Earth Vote.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Right now most of the media is left wing propaganda nonsense.

Looks like someone has never heard of either R. Murdoch’s empire (mainly Fox crap) or J. Sinclair Smith (Sinclair Broadcast Group). Between them and Elmo, you’d be hard pressed to find any ‘liberal’ voices that actually have a decent overall market share.

And for the record…. the so-called ‘left wing’ CAN’T do propaganda – such can be generated only by one side of an argument, and the other side is left with demonstrating clear and cogent facts to counter the constant stream of shit coming out of Trump’s mouth.

Like I said a few weeks ago, it’s too bad that we don’t have a Truth-In-Naming-Social-Media-Sites law. Trump would then have to call his site “Lies Social”.

When they finally invent time-travel, I hope someone goes back and slaps the bejeebus out of the Founding Fathers for not including the requirement that any candidate for President must also be mentally competent.

dickeyrat says:

Only the Beginning! A year or two from now, Bezos, most or all of his employees, many many of their colleagues and God knows who else will be at Guantanamo, awaiting their public trials before military tribunals, prior to their executions. This is exclusively fat trump’s Amerika, and we can stick a fork in it — it is done! (Sidenote: just wait until the nation’s overpaid uniformed paid-bullies are granted universal indemnified immunity! Open season on Black people, among others.)

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