The Washington Post died in daylight

Its demise offers a glimpse into a dismal future.

I didn’t spend much time at the Washington Post, so I’m a bit hesitant to comment about its decay. But wow! It’s astonishing how easy it was to destroy such a historical institution, central to modern America’s longstanding sense of self.

What I find most difficult to digest is how The Post’s decomposition at the hands of a tech mogul makes a ton of sense, a good fit with the broader narrative of the corruption of American democracy. What’s happening to The Post offers a taste of what’s to come to American society. America’s sense of self is, indeed, in need of an update.

Though propelled to power by the grievances of white working class Americans pining for some halcyon past, in despair over their loss of status in the contemporary world, Trump empowered a clutch of tech multi-billionaires with strange notions about the future of humanity and their pre-eminent place in it.

WaPo owner Jeff Bezos isn’t even the worst sociopath of the techno-oligarchic gang. That award probably goes to Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, or Marc Andreesen, preoccupied with harnessing a hi-tech, post-human future.

Bezos spends too much time working on his obliques, but otherwise he strikes me as the standard rich hedonist–happy to own the very ultrabiggest yacht ever and to buy Venice for his wedding, to parade his voluptuous new squeeze.

Nonetheless, he clearly seems to believe that the concerns of everyday mortals like you and I, worried about the mortgage and health insurance and the state of democracy in the United States are secondary to his worry over how to transition to a world of artificial intelligence and get the government to pay for rockets to take us to Mars.

He is decidedly not concerned about the health of American journalism.

So here’s my take on what happened to the Washington Post. I have no idea why he bought the thing. At the time he was still married to MacKenzie Scott–who evidently cares about ordinary human beings. Maybe that was it.

But while the paper cost only half as much as his yacht, the purchase proved costly: Bezos’ other companies lost billions in federal contracts due to the Post’s coverage of the Trump administration.

When the prospect of a second Trump administration came into view, a MacKenzie-less Bezos decided that the future of his most lucrative businesses mattered most, whether democracy died in darkness or not. He ditched the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president in 2024 and devoted the opinion pages to extol free markets and whatever else might boost his bottom line.

That was when I left The Post, when Bezos and his underling Will Lewis put a kid in charge of steering the paper’s opinions in a direction that might best indulge the appetites of Trump’s White House. The gambit failed in a fundamental way. This week The Post cut a third of its journalists. It will probably cut more.

Newspapers are in a precarious position. The Post’s readership might have dwindled even had it not decided to prostrate itself before the president. But the decision to put its opinions at the service of Trump’s whims cost it hundreds of thousands of readers. The proposal that The Post could replace them with a MAGA-friendly readership proved wrong.

Why does this matter? Well, we’ve lost The Post. But what’s most depressing is that Bezos couldn’t care less. His investment in one of the nation’s legendary newspapers mattered as much to him as his investment in “Melania.” They were both unprofitable–money sunk into a black hole. But they both delivered what most mattered: Trump’s approval.

The old concern that campaign contributions from rich corporate interests would steer politics in their favor seems quaint in this new world, in which the rich corporate interests have become so rich that they can outright purchase the tools shaping the public conversation and not care if the investment goes south.

Bezos, in this sense, opened a new path for America’s democratic implosion. Fox News may distort reality on a daily basis. But it still has to make money. Bezos does not.