Jeff Bezos vented to Trump that his WaPo staff is ‘out of control’ and ‘crazy’

President Donald J. Trump said that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos complained to him about the “out of control” and “crazy” staff at the paper, one of the nation’s leading bastions of anti-Trump sentiment.

During an interview with Outkick’s Clay Travis, Trump expressed optimism in working with Bezos, a former critic, whom he said he has gotten to know and expects to have a better relationship with during his second term.

The president said that Bezos is “a good guy,” adding, “I didn’t really know him in the first term. I mean, it’s such a difference between now and the first time.”

.@ClayTravis sat down with President Trump on Air Force One on their way to the NCAA wrestling championships @realDonaldTrump @POTUS pic.twitter.com/3Hf3Yw8MXc

— OutKick (@Outkick) March 23, 2025

Trump said that Bezos explained that the paper is trying to be “fairer” but is fed up with his mutinous left-wing staff, which has run articles that were critical of him.

“He said, ‘This is crazy, I lose my fortune running this thing and they, you know, they’re out of control.’ These people are crazy,” Trump told Travis. “They’re crazy people. They’re out of control.”

The billionaire Amazon kingpin infuriated WaPo staff when he nixed an endorsement of failed Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who would go on to be clobbered by Trump, and is working to clean up the nest of left-wingers in the WaPo’s editorial department.

Last month, Bezos announced that he had told the WaPo team that the paper’s opinion page would undergo a dramatic shift away from left-wing propaganda to promote the more traditional American ideals of personal liberties and free markets.

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too…

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 26, 2025

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” he said.

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job,” Bezos added.

He also broke the news that the paper’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, chose to quit instead of fully embracing the new direction. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’ After careful consideration, David decided to step away,” he wrote.

Last year, Bezos reacted to temper tantrums from his staff over quashing the Kamala endorsement- including overstuffed neocon poobah Robert Kagan, who quit in protest – by telling his employees how it was going to be.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” he wrote in an October 2024 op-ed.

Trump told Travis that Bezos and other high profile execs who attended his inauguration are a sign of how things have changed in America.

“If you look at the inauguration, look at the people that were on that stage,” he said. “Here was a who’s who of a world that was totally against me the first time.

“It’s a much different presidency. I have much more support,” Trump noted.

Staff Writer

Chris Donaldson is an ordinary American who is concerned about rampant corruption as well as the ongoing attacks on our way of life by those who have contempt for our hard-earned freedoms. A Navy veteran, he has been a frequent contributor to conservative websites and resides in Florida.

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