Trump's Amazon Attack Might Spell Bad News For Whole Foods Merger
President Trump, it seems, is going to war with corporate America. At the same time three executives are making news for exiting Trump's manufacturing council – garnering some negative reactions from the President on Twitter – Trump has renewed an attack on Amazon. Earlier today, President Trump laid into Amazon, criticizing it for doing damage to retailers across the US.
"Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers," Trump said in his tweet. "Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!" Trump seems to have posted this outburst with little prompting – the tweet before concerned the CEOs leaving his manufacturing council, while the tweet after congratulated the two remaining candidates in an upcoming election in Alabama.
For what prompted this, though, we likely don't have to look very far. After all, this isn't the first time Trump has railed against Amazon, and it probably won't be the last. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also happens to own The Washington Post, a newspaper that has been critical of Trump's politics since he first hit the campaign trail. It makes sense that, then, that Trump would try to blast Amazon in his ongoing war with The Washington Post.
Trump's derision, however, could suggest a bumpy road for Amazon in its quest to acquire Whole Foods. Though President Trump won't really have any direct say in whether or not Amazon and Whole Foods should be able to merge, he'll certainly have the ear of some at the Federal Trade Commission, which will make the final say. If he wanted to, Trump could make it all the more difficult for Amazon to realize its retail dreams.
Should he call the merger into question, he wouldn't be alone. In July, David Cicilline, who serves as the ranking Democrat on the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, authored a letter in which he asked the Subcommittee to hold an oversight hearing on the proposed merger. Though Cicilline took no position of legality on the merger himself, he did bring up concerns about additional consolidation within the market.
Regardless of who's in the White House and who's in charge of the FTC, Amazon's plan to buy Whole Foods almost certainly would have faced some form of regulatory scrutiny. Under Trump, though, it might face a lot more due to the fact that he doesn't really care for Jeff Bezos' side gig as a newspaper mogul.