Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos: the long and dramatic story of their enmity

Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos: the long and dramatic story of their enmity

On Thursday, Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, took an extraordinary step by publishing a personal essay alleging that the National Enquirer offered to bury embarrassing personal photos of him, stemming from an extramarital affair, if a researcher working for Bezos it will no longer refer to the supposedly "politically motivated" nature of the filtered images.

Bezos wrote in the essay in which he rejected this attempt at extortion and, instead, made public the whole sordid story. (The National Enquirer was the first to report that Bezos was involved in an affair with a woman named Lauren Sanchez, Bezos had announced just before the report that he and his wife, Mackenzie, were in the process of divorce).

Few details have emerged to support the assertion by Bezos' researcher, a man named Becker's Gavin, that there was a political motivation for the Enquirer to cover the boss of Amazon. It is also unclear why American Media Inc., Enquirer's parent company, was so obsessed with trying to prevent Becker from labeling that media coverage as one motivated by political reasons.

However, Manuel Roig-Franzia, a Washington Post reporter who spoke with de Becker recently, said this on MSNBC on Thursday night (the bold ones are mine):

"They have begun to believe, in the field of Bezos, that this publication of the National Enquirer could have had political motivations. Becker's Gavin told us he does not think Jeff Bezos's phone was hacked. Think that it is possible that a government entity may have obtained your text messages. "

Wait, what?

What we do know - and to be clear, there is much more than we DO NOT KNOW - are two very basic things:

1) Donald Trump and AMI's boss, David Pecker, have a very long friendship that, on at least one occasion, led the Enquirer to pay a woman (Karen McDougal) for the rights to her story that she had an affair with Trump in the mid-2000s and then that story was never published.

2) Trump has always been antagonistic with Bezos publicly. How antagonistic? Much.

"The @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives the owner @JeffBezos the power to harm the public due to the low taxation of @Amazon," Trump tweeted in December 2015.

The employees would get more money and we will get rid of the false news for a long period of time. Is @WaPo a registered lobbyist? "

Following the Enquirer's report that Bezos was involved in an extramarital affair, Trump tweeted last month: "I'm sorry to hear the news that Jeff Bozo was shot down by a competitor whose report, I understand, is much more accurate than the report in his lobby newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. We hope the newspaper will soon be in better and more responsible hands! "

(In addition to attacking Bezos, Trump has repeatedly referred to the "Washington Post" as the "Amazon Washington Post," Amazon does not own the Post, Bezos owns it).

When journalists asked him about the news of Bezos' divorce, Trump said this: "I wish you luck, I wish you luck. It's going to be a beauty. "

It is worth noting that Trump has not always been antagonistic to Bezos, especially before his decision to run for president. Trump, apparently with admiration, tweeted a quote from Bezos ("If you never want to be criticized, for God's sake, do not do anything new") in 2014. Bezos had bought the Washington Post in 2013.

Do any of the above points mean that politically motivated accusations in text messages and images leaked to the Enquirer must be linked to Trump? No. But Trump has made clear his feelings about Bezos, Amazon and The Washington Post for years. And those feelings are decidedly negative.