Fake news? Trial balloon? Big misunderstanding?
At the very least, it sounds like Punchbowl News didn’t do enough checking on a “scoop” this morning. Earlier today, the DC-Media-insider site reported that Amazon had entered the tariff wars. Punchbowl alerted reader that the online giant would soon break out tariff price hikes, in order to make clear to consumers what Donald Trump’s policies were doing to their wallets:
Amazon doesn’t want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war.
So the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product, according to a person familiar with the plan.
The shopping site will display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs – right next to the product’s total listed price.
Honestly, this might not be a bad idea — if it weren’t so blatantly political. We’ll get back to that, but the White House slapped back almost immediately after Punchbowl’s scoop. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “a hostile and political act,” and accused Amazon of colluding with China to attack Trump’s policies:
🚨 TENSION WITH BEZOS?!@PressSec just called out Jeff Bezos and Amazon for pushing tariff price increases on the site:
“This is CERTAINLY a hostile and political action by Amazon!”
“Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm. So this is another reason why Americans… pic.twitter.com/xRWLSjCpE4
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 29, 2025
It didn’t take long after that for Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos to attempt to head off a fight with the White House. Shortly after the press conference, an Amazon spokesman told the Washington Post — which Bezos also owns, of course — that Punchbowl’s report was entirely false. Amazon never even considered such a move, at least not on the consumer-retail side:
Amazon on Tuesday disputed a news report that it planned to display the costs of President Donald Trump’s tariffs to consumers, after White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt condemned the e-commerce giant over the story.
In an emailed statement, company spokesman Tim Doyle said the team that runs Haul, Amazon’s low-cost Temu competitor, “has considered listing import charges on certain products.” But it “was never a consideration for the main Amazon site,” he said, “and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”
If Doyle is telling the truth, then Punchbowl really fouled this up. I’ve only barely heard of Temu and have never heard of Haul, which definitely operates outside of the Amazon marketplace. The site allows consumers to become their own personal importers, with direct-to-consumer shipping from overseas providers. That’s the reason that Haul might have to disclose import fees on final sales; the final consumer will have to pay those import fees directly as a consequence of purchasing overseas and the new tariffs imposed by the US.
For those buying off of Amazon, those fees are incorporated into the final sale price because Amazon has already imported the product. It might be possible to break out the portion of import fees paid by Amazon to each individual product, and it might even be educational for consumers to know it. They can assess whether the tariffs are worth it, and might even choose an American-made product instead. However, that seems like a difficult task to pull off for each individual unit sale on Amazon, and a whole lot of programming work to make it happen.
Is the juice worth the squeeze just to make a political point for a few weeks? YMMV, but I’d find it difficult to believe that Bezos spends his money on pointless political fluffery. Of course, Bezos did buy the Washington Post, so it’s possible that Amazon really did propose this and leaked it as a trial balloon. However, it seems easier to believe that either Punchbowl or its sources confused Haul with Amazon’s main marketplace and got way out over their skis.
It’s also pretty clear that Punchbowl hit the publish button without doing sufficient fact-checking. Punchbowl, like the rest of the media, seems to rush anything that makes Trump look bad, while sitting on anything that either paints him in a better light or makes Democrats look good. For a very good demonstration of this phenomenon, look no further than the outrage over Trump’s blue suit at the funeral of Pope Francis:
HOAX: If you heard anything about the Pope’s funeral from the drive-by media you heard that Trump thumbed his nose at the Vatican by wearing a blue and not a black suit. Everyone from the Prince of Wales to Joe Biden wore a blue suit – the only way I know this is because of 𝕏. pic.twitter.com/NbPRPOARGU
— @amuse (@amuse) April 27, 2025
Funny how that happens, eh? By the way, no one provided any sourcing that the Vatican specifically requested black suits in the first place. Snopes (not exactly MAGA Central) couldn’t dig it up either. If so, then several men failed to heed it, as the wider pictures show clearly. It seems much more likely that the Vatican either stressed the need for somber attire, or may not have said anything in the first place.
But that’s par for the course with the Protection Racket Media.
Update: The media is casting this as a surrender by Bezos under pressure. Could it be? Forbes tries to connect the dots:
Trump called Bezos on Tuesday morning to complain about the reports, two senior officials in the White House told CNN, adding the president was “pissed.”
Trump confirmed Tuesday afternoon he talked to “good guy” Bezos, who “did the right thing” and “solved the problem very quickly,” according to the president.
Maybe. Trump did say that Bezos “solved the problem pretty quickly.” But this doesn’t say that Bezos backed down. It sounds as if Bezos wasn’t aware of the claim, checked with his team, and told Trump it was nonsense. That would have “solved the problem,” too. I somehow doubt that Bezos would have approved this idea only to shoot it down at the first possible opportunity for blowback.
