The president issued an executive order after hours last night, aimed at evaluating the U.S. Postal Service. Citing the mail service’s “unsustainable financial path,” Trump’s order demands a “thorough” task force evaluation of the USPS’s finances and operations.
The service has been a long time talking point for Trump, with Twitter attacks dating back to 2013, when he bemoaned a planned end of Saturday mail delivery. Of late, however, the Postal Service has seemingly been caught in the crossfire of his single-minded attack on Amazon.
Back in December, Trump called the USPS out on Twitter once again, saying it was “losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer?”
Of course, it’s worth noting that Amazon’s dealings with the USPS aren’t so straightforward.
While, as The New York Times notes, the executive order doesn’t single out Amazon by name, Trump has been ramping up attacks on the online retail giant. Much of that anger appears to be directed at founder Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own The Washington Post, a paper that hasn’t always painted the president in flattering light.
In June, he combined two of his favorite Bezos targets into a single, camel-cased hashtag, writing, “The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”
Honestly, I could put a bunch of other examples in here, but it’s probably easier to just link to this story Taylor did, collecting all of the times Trump has used Twitter to take on Jeff Bezos. Get comfortable, because it’s a long list. The full executive order, meanwhile, can be viewed here.