Trump slams Amazon, again, wiping $US5b from its market cap

You might think the US president would be an admirer of Amazon, the American company that has become a world-leader in online retail, cloud computing and AI.

But you would be wrong.

Donald Trump has frequently attacked the business founded by Jeff Bezos – in part, perhaps, because Mr Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which has frequently published articles the president describes as “fake news.”

And although it has been lost in the renewed racial-divide hurly-burly and the decision to disband his two CEO advisory councils after a run of resignations, Mr Trump made his sharpest critique yet of Amazon overnight, tweeting:

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

Mr Trump’s post pushed Amazon’s market cap down by 1.2% or $US5.7 billion in an hour in two hours of pre-market trading, which sounds dramatic until you consider the starting point was a shade under $US480 billion. Shares recovered some of the ground in regular trading to finish down 0.46%.

Amazon is hurting traditional retailers, as it will hurt them here.

But, in the US at least, Amazon and other online retailers are also creating new jobs, at least in the US. Lots of them.

As Mr Trump should know from Fox News, Amazon recently held a multi-city job fair in a bid to fill 50,000 open positions – as part of a wider effort to bring on 150,000 more staff (the company already employs around 450,000, not including the 91,000 employees it will take on if its $US14 billion purchase of bricks-and-mortar supermarket chain Whole Foods is approved).

It's similar to the president's antagonism to Apple, another company that has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US in areas like R&D, design, marketing and app development. But that cuts no ice with Mr Trump, who is furious China gets the low-end product assembly jobs at the bottom of Apple's food chain.

The president has a history of antagonism to Amazon and its majority owner, Jeff Bezos (also known as the world’s second richest man, with a wealth of $US83 billion). Last year, Mr Trump said of Mr Bezons and his company: "He has a huge anti-trust problem, because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing."

And in June this year he tweeted:

The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2017

It was not clear exactly what the president meant. The US has no internet tax per se, and Amazon already adds applicable sales taxes to purchases. Still, the president seems to have a taste to push Amazon around in some fashion – and that could be traditional retailers’ best hope.

CEO advisory panels disbanded
Beyond his contretemps with Amazon and Apple, the Wall Street Journal raises the broader concern today that "a GOP [Republican] president who loses the business class has a big problem."

The conservative paper's comments come after the president's two CEO advisory panels (one on strategy, one on manufacturing) were disbanded earlier today.

Not even 24 hours ago, Mr Trump tweeted that he had CEOs lined up to replace the half-dozen who had quit in protest over his Charlottesville comments. 

One report says the remaining chief executives held a conference call this morning and decided to disband; Mr Trump maintained on Twitter that he got in first.

At any rate, the CEO advisory panels are no more. Many chief executives remain fans of Mr Trump's trimming of regulations and his plans to cut taxes. But at this point his tax plan is extremely sketchy, and doubts have emerged over the president's effectiveness with his failure to get any major legislation through the Republican majority in Congress, and his apparent inability to avoid distractions. Yesterday, for example, was supposed to be "infrastructure day." But in the end, Mr Trump stayed on-topic for just six minutes of a Trump Tower briefing before going into an extended, free-form attack on the media and reanimating his theory that both sides were to blame for the Charlottesville violence. 

Even commentators on the usually supportive Fox News were left gob-smacked, and Republican senators lined up to condemn the president's remarks. Of the merits of his $US1 trillion infrastructure plan, not a word was said. Once again, Mr Trump's policy was drowned out by his side-show noise.

There was yet more Trump controversy yesterday, at least across the Tasman, as The Australian revealed that a Trump-backed casino bid was rejected in 1987 because NSW Police reported, in minutes to cabinet, that Mr Trump had mafia ties. But amid other scandals and barracking, the mob-ties story got no cut-through in the US.