By CHRISTIAN FRANKLIN, Opinion Editor
There’s never a shortage of drama in Washington nowadays, with the latest news between the White House and Amazon crisis clashing into new territory challenging political corporate influences.
Regarding reports by Shawn McCreesh and Karen Weiss of The New York Times, the White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt ,speaks out on Amazon on Tuesday. By making allocations of the company being hostile and using a political movement response to the reports, considering display of the cost of tariffs on its packaging and its product pages.
Amazon continues to deny the allegation regarding the policy over its latest stance on its platform.
The incident reveals more than just corporate communication disputes.
It exposes the fragile truth in an increasingly political economy.
The main focus of this drama is that the economic reality of tariffs are being paid upfront by the American consumers and not foreign governments.
President Trump has continued his long claim of the opposite, promoting a penalty on China to pay tariffs charges.
But for China the math doesn’t lie, importers passed down the cost to the supply chain which in the end is American shoppers, who are really left with pinching pennies.
News reported that Amazon is considering making the fact unavoidable by broadcasting tariffs related charges directly on its site.
Regarding the idea, according to an Amazon spokesperson, they discussed only for a niche platform called Amazon haul, which specifically competes with platforms like Temu and any other giant Chinese e-commerce.
All while the White House took the idea and ran with it, using it to make allegations of Amazon launching a political attack on Trump’s administration.
Leavitt’s response quickly escalated, standing alongside Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. She is the one that accused Amazon of its hypocrisy, trying to figure out why it never implemented the similar transparency during inflation spikes under the Biden administration.
As she continues to bring up an old headline of Amazon “ partnering” up with Chinese propaganda, which known companies are untrustworthy. The agenda was more clear, and Amazon was not responding to tariffs, but it was targeting a political game to undermine the administration.
Now the narrative is really being shown here, the White House continues its investment in maintaining the illusion that tariffs are working.
But according to most Americans, they are not winning the trade war and that they are feeling the economic pain. Any challenges to the narrative posed as a potential disruption in the features tell shoppers they are paying more because of tariffs, which will lead up to being a threat, whether Amazon intentionally did it or not it’s still touched a nerve.
Crazy to believe that just after Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder publicly praises the Trump administration. At the New York Times conference deal back in December, Bezos called Trump more “confident” then during his run in the first term and he is hopeful about the president’s energy towards deregulation. Amazon has donated 1 million to Trump’s administration securing seats for Bezos and his fiancé at the Capital.
So what brought up the sudden hostility from the White House? The only answer is political expediency, for Trump‘s reelection campaign as it takes front and center on economic nationalism.In its push to bring back jobs and cracking down on China to shield American workers.
This moment for consumers associate higher prices with the policy taking effect.
Rather than global factors of greedy corporations, the narrative only crumbles. With Amazon hypothetical transparency it threatens the storyline which leads to discretion.
Amazon is far from being innocent with the corporate giant’s known history of dodging taxes, undercutting competition and even exploiting labor.
It now shifts its interest towards displaying charges which is driven by competitor Temu.
Which doesn’t change the fact that the White House’s reaction shows paranoia and projection.
The policy comes with its challenges and consequences, and Americans deserve to know how it will impact their wallets. Since the beginning, the challenges of tech companies fighting over who pays the economic difficulty is democracy, and it is being filtered through political alliances .
Whether or not Amazon plans to display tariff related costs on this platform is beside the point.
The main thing that matters is that transparency poses a potential threat to the government.