The Gravest Abuse

Jonathan Chait published an interesting piece yesterday in New York magazine (link here) about how Donald Trump's gravest abuse of power is not the Ukraine scandal but, instead, the President's efforts to punish Amazon, parent company of the Washington Post, because of the latter prints articles that embarrass and expose the White House.

Amazon bid on and most likely would have won a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon. But Trump scuttled that, and the contract went to another company that was less competitive.

Trump did this entirely out of spite to retaliate against the Post. And the American taxpayers will pay more for the Pentagon to acquire cloud computing services from a company other than Amazon.

I agree that this is a disgrace and Trump must be stopped from doing this again.

I don't think I agree that it's Trump's most serious offense. Trump's compromises in Ukraine directly threatened America's own national security. Trump put self interest before the national interest.

With the cloud computing contract now going to a company other than Amazon, yes, there could be a very slight step down in service which, remotely, might have some minor effect on national security. But the damage is not as grave.

I'm surprised Chait did not mention in his piece that Trump went after another media outlet in 2017 in an attempt to influence and punish coverage: Trump's Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to block the AT&T merger to force them to divest CNN, which in turn would be snapped up by News Corp, which produces Fox News, an outlet that regularly heaps praise, and a lot of it, on the President.

Whether or not any of these are the worst really may be academic at this point. Trump is capable of harming the country multiple times over, as they examples demonstrate, so the sooner he's gone the better.