In a tweet, President Donald Trump calls on the United States Postal Service to charge Amazon “much more” in postage fees
Latest criticism of online retailer and its CEO Jeff Bezos — Amazon stock opens as much as 0.6 percent lower after tweet
Context & Ripple Effects
This tweet is the opening move in a sustained campaign: within months Trump escalated from public posts to direct pressure, with sources reporting he wanted USPS to raise Amazon's shipping costs while advisers encouraged him to cancel Amazon's Pentagon cloud contract, and later that he personally pushed Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon — and was rebuffed.
The pattern outlived the first term: by 2025 Trump was again calling Bezos directly, this time to complain about reports that Amazon was adding tariff prices to listings. The 2017 tweet matters because it established postage rates — a lever nominally controlled by an independent agency — as a recurring instrument of White House pressure on a single company.
First-order effects
- Amazon stock opened as much as 0.6% lower after the tweet, an immediate market read on shipping-cost risk to the retail business.
- USPS leadership faces direct political pressure over its rate-setting for Amazon, whose parcel volumes are central to the agency's package business.
Second-order effects
- The pressure moved from rhetoric to personnel: Trump's reported push to have Brennan double Amazon's rates tested how much independence the Postmaster General could maintain against the president.
- Advisers' encouragement to cancel Amazon's Pentagon cloud contract tied the postage fight to federal procurement, threatening a second revenue stream beyond shipping.
Third-order effects
- If a president can publicly target one company's postal rates, the boundary between independent-agency pricing and executive preference becomes a standing vulnerability for any large USPS shipper.
- The Trump–Bezos friction proved durable across terms — resurfacing in 2025 over tariff pricing — making regulatory and political exposure a permanent line item in Amazon's risk profile rather than a one-off episode.
The trend: Executive-branch pressure on USPS rate-setting is emerging as a recurring lever against Amazon, escalating from tweets to direct pushes on the Postmaster General and federal procurement.