Wall Street Journal article about President Fucktard Trump and his idiotic war against successful businesses including Amazon (which I love) and AT&T which is where I get most of my dividend income. Drop dead Trump.

Wall Street Journal - President Fucktard Trump Target's Amazon. The President’s tweets make any regulatory action seem political.

By The Editorial Board - March 29, 2018 449 COMMENTS

Donald Trump slammed Amazon on Twitter Thursday, and its stock price went up. Maybe investors are figuring out that deploying federal power against the online retailing behemoth isn’t as easy as pressing “Tweet”—for which Americans should be grateful no matter what they think of Amazon.

On Wednesday the Axios website reported what was hardly a secret—that Mr. Trump doesn’t like Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the relentlessly anti-Trump Washington Post. Amazon shares fell about 4.4% on the day, amid the general investor angst over political anger aimed at Facebook and the big tech companies.

Then on Thursday Mr. Trump, perhaps boiling over after a calm week, tweeted: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”

Amazon wisely declined to respond, and the President is wrong to target a private company. That’s what Democrats do—as Barack Obama did against Staples for executive compensation (2015), Anthem for raising insurance premiums (2010), and the Koch brothers for opposing renewable fuels (2015), among others. But Amazon shares popped back 1.1% Thursday in a rising market.

The reality is that Mr. Trump and the executive branch can’t do much to hurt Amazon—at least not legally, or without an effort to build a far better case than his tweets offer.

Mr. Trump complains about Amazon’s state and local tax payments, but Amazon has collected billions of dollars in sales tax in the states that require it. It's true that cities and states competing for Amazon’s second headquarters have offered an embarrassment of taxpayer subsidies. But however regrettable, such corporate dowries aren’t the concern of the federal government.

Mr. Trump could try to unleash the Internal Revenue Service, though that would be a scandal that could be an impeachable offense. The press and prosecutors would not give the Trump IRS the pass they gave Lois Lerner during the Obama years for targeting conservative nonprofits with extra scrutiny.

Alternatively, Mr. Trump could try to gin up antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department. But the federal government would struggle to prove consumer harm, the most basic criterion for an antitrust case. Amazon has disrupted the retailing business by delivering online consumer goods conveniently and often at lower prices.

One place Amazon likely does enjoy an unfair competitive advantage is due to federal intervention. The Obama Justice Department brought an antitrust case against Apple for trying to compete with Amazon’s e-books dominance. These columns called the case “quarter-baked,” but liberal judges approved.

Amazon has been the main beneficiary, and today it accounts for around 75% of all e-book sales. Mr. Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department should review that case, though the President’s social-media outbursts will make any such intervention now seem politically motivated. Mr. Trump’s tweets have already cast a political pall on Justice’s legally dubious antitrust case against the AT&T -Time Warner merger.

Mr. Trump’s other big gripe is that taxpayers are on the losing end of Amazon’s deal with the U.S. Postal Service. But that story is also more complicated. The Post Office has often operated at a net loss, but package volumes grew in fiscal 2017 by more than 11%, making it a rare growth market. Many of the additional 589 million boxes delivered last year came from Amazon.

Though imperfect, the deal is mutually beneficial. The Post Office arguably needs Amazon more than Amazon needs the Post Office. The Post Office could drop Amazon as a delivery partner, but it would likely have to raise prices elsewhere or endure higher losses. Would Mr. Trump take credit for that?

Mr. Trump can rail against anyone he wants, but America is still a nation of laws, as Mr. Obama also discovered. This is a lesson Mr. Trump’s critics forgot as they cried wolf over a fascist takeover. The political reality is that the more Mr. Trump publicly assails Amazon, the harder it will be to take regulatory action, deserved or not.

Appeared in the March 30, 2018, print edition.