Amazon might put how much the tariffs on items cost them, and the White House has hit back
The White House has claimed that it would be ‘hostile’ of Amazon to display the tariff cost for each item on their website.
There have been reports that the gargantuan online retailer is planning on introducing this so their customers can see how much the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration would add to the price.
However, Donald Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had just spoken to the US president about this and hit out at Amazon for what she called ‘a hostile and political act’.
She said: “I just got off the phone with the president about this, about Amazon’s announcement. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.”
She then held up a printout of a 2021 report from Reuters with the headline: “Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm.”
Amazon may soon start showing how much tariffs are increasing costs (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos had previously donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, which he attended.
Before the US election he announced that the Washington Post, which he also owns, would not be endorsing a candidate in the contest between Trump and Kamala Harris, a move which prompted a significant backlash and led to the Amazon mogul explaining himself by claiming newspaper endorsements ‘do nothing to tip the scales of an election’.
He claimed he was making a ‘principled decision’, while columnists at his paper signed a joint statement saying the move was ‘an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love’.
In February, Bezos announced that the opinion section of the Post would be focused on supporting ‘personal liberties and free markets’, while earlier this week Trump said billionaires Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg ‘have been great’ and that he enjoyed ‘a higher level of respect’ from them.
Jeff Bezos has been pretty close to Trump in his second term, but might have attracted his anger (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
Tariffs are a major cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policy, having announced a whole list of them for countries around the world before lowering the levels for most of them.
However, while Trump has rowed back or delayed some of his tariff plans, he’s ended up getting into a tit-for-tat tariff battle with China, hiking the tariffs on some goods up to a whopping 245 percent.
Companies in the US importing goods from China will now have to pay massive amounts to the US government to keep doing business, and naturally they’ll pass the costs on to their consumers, the American public.
Amazon laying out how much tariffs on each item would cost could make it pretty stark to consumers that tariffs were responsible for price rises.
In a statement provided to the Washington Post, Amazon said that adding the cost of tariffs ‘was never a consideration for the main Amazon site’, adding that ‘this was never approved and is not going to happen’.
Trump said that Bezos had ‘done the right thing’, saying the Amazon boss had ‘solved the problem very quickly’ and was a ‘good guy’.
