I’m quitting Amazon. We all should.
A full-scale economic boycott is the only thing that can slow down their pay-for-play influence with this administration.
A report on more than 150 of Trump’s corporate colluders by More Perfect Union is genuinely eye-opening — and I’d encourage you to read it and click through the interactive data, here: https://act.link/gi-sw782
The Money Trail Starts at the Inauguration
When Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time on January 20, 2025, Amazon was there — in a very literal and very expensive way. The company made a $1 million cash donation to Trump’s inaugural fund and simultaneously provided a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the ceremony on Prime Video — a $2 million combined commitment that was a massive jump from the $58,000 Amazon gave for Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
To be clear about what that kind of donation buys: donors who gave at least $1 million were promised high-level access to the president-elect and his inner circle, including tickets and face time with incoming Cabinet officials. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos secured a prime seat at the swearing-in ceremony inside the Capitol Rotunda. That’s not philanthropy. That’s an access purchase.
And Amazon wasn’t alone. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a record $239 million, more than doubling the previous record, with the overwhelming majority coming from seven-figure corporate checks. In an era when campaign finance limits at least theoretically exist, inaugural funds have become the preferred vehicle for corporations to legally write unlimited checks directly to an incoming president — with no caps, no restrictions, and a clear expectation of return.
Then Came the Billion-Dollar Cloud Deal
If the inauguration donation was an opening bid, August 2025 produced the first notable return on investment.
The U.S. General Services Administration announced a governmentwide agreement with Amazon Web Services providing up to $1 billion in cloud service credits for federal agencies — to be used through the end of 2028. The deal is framed as part of the Trump administration’s “OneGov” strategy to modernize federal IT infrastructure and accelerate its AI agenda. Federal agencies can now draw directly from Amazon’s cloud ecosystem, bypassing the usual procurement process and the third-party vendors it typically involves.
The structure of the deal is worth noting: instead of paying Amazon, the government receives credits. It’s not a contract in the traditional sense — it’s closer to a billion-dollar coupon book, pre-loaded with Amazon’s services. AWS now has direct access to a government technology market estimated to be worth between $80 and $100 billion, and they’ve locked in their position at the center of it.
Critics have noted the timing is hard to ignore. Amazon donated $2 million to get a seat at the table in January. By August, they had a billion-dollar partnership with the federal government. And the relationship kept growing — Amazon also served as a corporate sponsor of the White House Easter Egg Roll in April, because apparently no access point is too small.
The $40 Million Documentary That Wasn’t Really About Art
Then there’s Melania.
Amazon paid $40 million to license the Brett Ratner-directed documentary Melania — the highest price ever paid for a commissioned documentary, according to multiple industry sources. Melania Trump served as executive producer with full editorial control, which is both unprecedented for a sitting First Lady and a significant detail when it comes to understanding who this project was really for.
According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, cited across multiple outlets including Forbes and CNN, Melania Trump personally received more than 70% of that $40 million — roughly $28 million — while her husband’s administration oversaw the federal agencies with whom Amazon was simultaneously negotiating a billion-dollar cloud deal.
And the math on the film itself doesn’t add up to a normal business decision. Amazon reportedly committed another $35 million on marketing, bringing the total investment to approximately $75 million for a documentary about a figure who, as one journalist noted, “commands relatively little public interest” by commercial film standards. Industry insiders acknowledged that the film was unlikely to recoup its costs through box office receipts. Box office analysts projected an opening weekend between $2 million and $5 million — the film ultimately made $7 million its opening weekend, well short of what would be needed to break even on a $75 million total commitment.
Former government ethics official Don Fox stated publicly that the documentary appeared designed to curry favor with the Trump administration. Ted Hope, who launched Amazon’s film division, said he couldn’t see how the price tag could be viewed as anything other than a bribe. Jimmy Kimmel called it a $75 million bribe on national television. Amazon said they believed audiences would be interested. You can decide which explanation you find more credible.
The Federal Cases That Were Sitting in the Balance
Here’s why all of this matters beyond the optics of expensive gift-giving: at the time Amazon was writing these checks and striking these deals, the company was facing serious federal scrutiny on multiple fronts — and Trump appointees were now overseeing the agencies handling those cases.
The most significant is FTC v. Amazon, the landmark antitrust case filed in September 2023 by the FTC and 17 state attorneys general, which accused Amazon of illegally maintaining monopoly power across its online retail marketplace. That case remained active and pending while Amazon was making its inaugural donation and pursuing its cloud partnership with the Trump administration.
In a separate matter, the FTC secured a $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon in September 2025 related to deceptive enrollment practices for Amazon Prime — the largest consumer protection settlement in FTC history.
On the labor side, Amazon faced its first formal NLRB joint-employer complaint in October 2024, accusing the company of illegally terminating a contract with a delivery service provider in retaliation for unionization efforts. And separately, OSHA had been waging a multi-year battle over ergonomic injuries at Amazon warehouses that resulted in a corporate-wide settlement in December 2024 covering ten cases, requiring Amazon to implement injury-prevention programs across hundreds of facilities.
Here is the question that none of Amazon’s press releases will answer: how do you think these cases would have proceeded if Jeff Bezos had not spent the prior months donating $2 million to the inauguration, signing a $40 million deal that put tens of millions directly in the First Lady’s pocket, and negotiating a billion-dollar cloud partnership with the administration? We can’t know for certain. But we can observe who has benefited, and how.
The Bigger Picture: 150 Companies, One System
Amazon is not an isolated case. It’s part of a documented, systematic pattern.
More Perfect Union, an advocacy journalism nonprofit, has produced an interactive investigative report called “Trump’s Corporate Colluders” that analyzed more than 150 top donors to Trump’s inauguration fund and the White House ballroom construction project, mapping what those corporations donated — and what they received in return. The report, produced in collaboration with investigative outlet Sludge, documents the regulatory rollbacks, dropped enforcement actions, favorable rulings, and lucrative government contracts that followed corporate donations with striking consistency across industries.
The pattern is not subtle. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigation into the company’s alleged illegal harvesting of users’ financial data was subsequently dropped. The CFPB was then effectively shut down. Google donated $1 million; the administration later congratulated Google’s CEO on a favorable antitrust ruling. The crypto industry donated more than any other sector — over $14 million — and promptly became the center of Trump administration policy, with its own White House czar, new favorable legislation, dropped investigations, and even a presidential memecoin.
The report is remarkable — genuinely eye-opening — and I’d encourage you to read it and click through the interactive data. The link is perfectunion.us/trumps-corporate-colluders.
The Receipts We Need Are Our Own
There’s a version of this that gets dismissed as whataboutism, or as normal Washington deal-making that has always happened. That framing misses something important.
This is about a specific and accelerating dynamic in which corporations are finding ways to make unlimited, transparent financial commitments directly to the personal and political interests of a sitting president — and receiving documented regulatory relief, government contracts, and dropped enforcement actions in return.
You and I cannot donate our way out of a federal investigation. We cannot write a check to make an OSHA case disappear. We cannot buy a government cloud contract by paying for a documentary. The rules, in theory, apply to everyone. But when the rules are enforced or not enforced based on whether a company has purchased access, the rules don’t actually apply to everyone. They apply to us.
Economic boycotts are not a perfect tool. Amazon is embedded deeply in American commerce — the supply chain, the cloud infrastructure, the delivery networks — in ways that make a clean break genuinely difficult for many people. I understand that. But the companies that feel the most invincible are the ones most dependent on our continued participation.
I’m pulling out. I’m finding other places to do business. I’m keeping the receipts on who else deserves the same treatment.
Transparency matters. So does where we spend our money.
Be kind, and wash your behind.
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