Trump Attacks Amazon, Saying It Does Not Pay Enough Taxes
WASHINGTON — President Trump escalated his attack on Amazon on Thursday, saying that the online behemoth does not pay enough taxes — and strongly suggesting that he may try to rein in the e-commerce business.
The president’s commentary was made in a Twitter post in which he accused Amazon of putting thousands of local retailers out of business and of using the United States Postal Service as “their Delivery Boy.”
Amazon and the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, are among Mr. Trump’s regular Twitter targets. In December, Mr. Trump questioned whether the United States Post Office charges Amazon enough for package deliveries. And in August, Mr. Trump said Amazon hurts taxpaying businesses.
Amazon, however, does pay taxes — $412 million in 2016, for instance, according to the company’s report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mr. Trump has attacked Amazon on Twitter more than a dozen times since late 2015, months after he had launched his presidential campaign. Many of those tweets seem to have been prompted by critical coverage in The Washington Post, the news organization that Mr. Bezos acquired personally in 2013 for $250 million.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly accused Mr. Bezos of using The Washington Post as a tool to intimidate opponents in Washington into treating Amazon more favorably, although editors at the newspaper say Mr. Bezos plays no role in directing its news coverage.
The president’s latest broadside did not mention The Washington Post, instead focusing on a handful of issues he has previously cited to criticize Amazon. While Amazon once widely avoided collecting sales tax in states, it now collects it in every state that has one for goods that it sells from its own inventory.
Some municipalities, however, have complained that Amazon does not collect local taxes under its agreements with states. And in most statesAmazon does not collect sales taxes on sales of goods sold by third parties on its platform.
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment.
The media company Axios reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump has wondered aloud whether Amazon could be vulnerable to antitrust or competition laws. Amazon shares fell almost 5 percent following that Axios article. In early trading Thursday, they fell another 3 percent.
Raj Shah, a deputy White House press secretary, said that Mr. Trump “has talked about the need to have tax parity between online retailers and brick and mortar retailers.”
Mr. Shah, speaking Thursday morning on the program, “Fox & Friends,” said this was something Congress could help facilitate and that the president would support.
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