The head of The Washington Post on Friday announced that the newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos will not be endorsing anyone in the 2024 presidential race, a revelation that came hours after more than a dozen people who worked for Donald Trump endorsed Marine Gen. John Kelly's assessment that he is a "fascist" threat to the constitutional order.
"The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates," Will Lewis, the paper's chief executive office, announced in a statement to the newsroom, as reported by The New York Times.
The Times reported that staffers had already drafted an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris when the decision was made. The decision not to publish was made by Bezos, according to the Post.
"This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty," tweeted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, warning that Trump would "see this as an invitation to further intimidate" Post owner Jeff Bezos.
"Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage," Baron added.
Lewis previously worked for right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and was implicated in the UK's tabloid phone-hacking scandal, reportedly commissioning a story based on stolen material as an editor at The Sunday Times. He took over as the Post's publisher and CEO earlier this year.
The Post has consistently endorsed Democrats since 1976, when it backed former President Jimmy Carter's campaign for the White House. The decision to endorse no one this time around comes after Trump, during his first term, was repeatedly angered by the Post's critical coverage, which he blamed on its billionaire owner.
In 2019, Amazon accused Trump of seeking to prevent the company from being awarded a $10 billion Pentagon contract, claiming he had intervened in the process in order to hurt "his perceived political enemy." The contract, for cloud computing, was instead awarded to Microsoft, prompting a legal battle that ended in 2022, when the Defense Department announced that Amazon, Google and Oracle would also get a share.
According to sources who spoke to the Post's own reporters, the decision to not publish an endorsement of Harris, which had already been drafted, "was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos."
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The Los Angeles Times this week announced it too would forgo a presidential endorsement after billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong intervened to prevent his editorial board from backing Vice President Kamala Harris. A number of editors at the Times have since resigned.
At the same time, former officials who worked for Trump during his first term in office are sounding the alarm about their ex-boss, warning that the stakes of the November election could not be any higher. In a letter obtained by Politico, 13 alum of the Trump administration said they backed the assessment of Gen. Kelly, who served as the former president's chief of staff and says he is the definition of a "fascist."
“We applaud General Kelly for highlighting in stark details the danger of a second Trump term," the officials, including a former Trump press secretary and a national security advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence, state in the letter. "Like General Kelly, we did not take the decision to come forward lightly. We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments. Everyone should heed General Kelly’s warning.”
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