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Seeking Pentagon Contracts, Bezos Rolls Out Red Carpet After Dropping $40 Million on ‘Melania’
"Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed," said one congressman.
Feb 03, 2026
The $40 million film Melania, a biography of the first lady that was purchased by Amazon, has been panned as a "bribe disguised as a documentary," an "expensive propaganda doc," and a "journey into the void."
But despite the reviews, the tech firm has poured an unprecedented $35 million into a marketing campaign for the documentary, and one government watchdog group suggested Monday that the investment by the third-richest person in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is already paying off.
Bezos welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin facilities in Florida on Monday as part of Hegseth's "Arsenal of Freedom" speaking tour, which is aimed at overhauling the Pentagon's relationship with defense tech companies.
"Blue Origin is committed to supporting national security to, through, and from space," said Bezos at the event.
Speaking during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour at Cape Canaveral, Jeff Bezos says U.S. national security now hinges on industrial speed, scale, and space-based capability.
READ MORE: https://t.co/cOUQii31TJ#amazon #jeffbezos #nationalnews #florida pic.twitter.com/uaFGaoMhnI
— KRCR News Channel 7 (@KRCR7) February 3, 2026
Blue Origin, Bezos' space exploration firm, has received billions of dollars in defense contracts to build technology that uses space lasers, nuclear-powered spacecraft, and a processing facility for satellites.
Hegseth said during his tour that Blue Origin is likely to do "plenty of winning" as the Pentagon hands out additional contracts.
Late last month, Amazon Web Services was also awarded a $581 million contract to support the US Air Force's Cloud One program.
Greg Williams, director of the Project on Government Oversight's Center for Defense Information, told USA Today that on its face, Hegseth's visits to Blue Origin as well as SpaceX, the space technology firm owned by Trump administration associate and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, were not "particularly novel."
But considering Bezos' purchase and promotion of the documentary spotlighting President Donald Trump's wife, said Williams, Hegseth's hobnobbing with the tech mogul raises new questions about Bezos' desire to curry favor with the White House.
"By spending a tiny amount of money to buy the rights," said Williams, Bezos "potentially gets a much larger return."
As such, Hegseth's visit to Blue Origin called attention to a situation of "unprecedented conflict of interest," Williams added.
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) summarized the apparent transaction involving the documentary rights and the government contracts: "Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed."
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'Melania': Of Course It's an Outright $75 Million Bribe
If America still had a Department of Justice, Jeff Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions.
Feb 02, 2026
I haven’t seen it. I hope you don’t, either.
This, from one of the kinder reviews:
“Across some 104 minutes, the first lady delivers these blatantly scripted and meaningless narrations with all the conviction of someone who just woke up from a two-hour nap and can’t remember what day it is.”
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times sees a “glossy, curiously impersonal” portrait of a woman who “rarely drops her Sphinxlike deadpan.” Nick Hilton of The Independent calls the first lady a “scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.” Guardian critic Xan Brooks says it “doesn’t have a single redeeming quality” and compares it to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”
Not since The Washington Post music critic Paul Hume observed that Margaret Truman’s singing voice in Constitution Hall in 1950 was “flat a good deal of the time” has a performance by a member of a sitting president’s family generated such averse reviews.
Yet because the The Washington Post is now owned by the man who spent $75 million on the movie ($40 million to make it, $35 million to promote it), I somehow doubt The Post will crap on it. (At least Monica Hesse, in her review for The Post, had the honesty to confess that “if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president, which was bankrolled by the company owned by the man who also pays my salary—NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron?”)
My purpose today is less to highlight this inane excuse for a film than to talk about its real excuse—allowing Jeff Bezos to give a big fat bribe to the president of the United States.
Why would Bezos bribe him? Please.
Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, owns Amazon and many other businesses that depend on the whims of the sociopath in the Oval Office. (Trump sold the idea of the documentary to Bezos when he dined at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024, just after the election, according to the The Wall Street Journal.)
Bezos’s Amazon Web Services has a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration for cloud services, which presumably Bezos would like renewed. His rocket company, Blue Origin, has over $2.3 billion in contracts from the U.S. Space Force.
Several of Bezos’s companies are subject to potential tariffs on goods from China. Amazon is under the cloud of a major antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (when the FTC was still independent—before it came under the putative control of the Oval Office). The trial is expected in 2027.
And so on.
Friends, when the history of this sordid period of America is written—assuming it’s not written by historians trying to curry favor with a future fascist regime—I hope the leaders of American business are condemned to the hellfire they deserve for helping destroy American democracy.
The outer ring of hell will be reserved for CEOs who stayed silent so as not to rile the narcissist-in-chief.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase will reside here because, notwithstanding his assumed role as spokesman for American business, Dimon has uttered no criticism of Trump other than to suggest, in the vaguest possible terms, that Trump’s attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence “is probably not a great idea.”
The middle ring will be reserved for business leaders who surrendered to Trump’s extortionist demands for personal payoffs.
The Ellisons, père Larry (the world’s third-richest person) et fils David, will be there, along with Shari Redstone and the board of Paramount, for paying Trump $16 million to settle his utterly baseless lawsuit against CBS.
Also in this middle ring will be Bob Iger, CEO of Disney (which owns ABC) and Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, for giving Trump $15 million to settle his equally spurious lawsuit against ABC News.
In the inner ring, where hell fires burn especially hot, will be business leaders who went beyond acquiescing to Trump’s extortion and decided to pay him big fat bribes.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will have pride of place here, after spending a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will get a spot here for lavishing on Trump a custom-designed glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base.
We’ll also find here the CEOs who coughed up $300,000 each for Trump’s ballroom — including crypto magnates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, oil tycoon Harold Hamm, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and every Big Tech mogul.
But Jeff Bezos, with his $75 million bribe of Trump, will deserve a special place in the innermost ring of hell.
The $40 million he paid Melania Trump’s production company is at least $35 million more than the cost of typical high-end documentaries. (By way of comparison, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films produced “RBG,” a documentary about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for around $1 million.)
Melania Trump pocketed more than 70 percent of that $40 million—or more than $28 million—the Journal reported.
The additional $35 million Bezos shelled out for marketing “Melania” is 10 times what other high-profile documentaries spend on marketing. The promotional budget for “RBG” was about $3 million. (To be sure, Melania Trump is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I suppose you might argue that Melania needed a larger promo budget. But this much larger?)
All this, at a time when Bezos is slashing the newsroom at the Post—it’s heart and soul—in order to “economize.” Forget the inner ring. Bezos deserves to be at the center of the inferno.
The promo money apparently worked, at least in the U.S., where opening-weekend ticket sales for “Melania” totaled $7 million.
But let’s be realistic. A $35 million promotional budget will get people into theaters to see paint drying.
If all goes well—given that opening weekend is usually about 25 percent of total box office and that movie houses pocket half — Amazon could end up with about $14 million on its $75 million investment. A pittance.
Yet this was never a financial investment. It was an investment in kissing Trump’s derriere. As Ted Hope, who was instrumental in starting Amazon’s film division, wondered aloud to The New York Times: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”
Of course it’s an outright bribe.
If America still had a Department of Justice, Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions. Penalty: imprisonment for up to 15 years.
(Also note: TheU.S. Constitution lists taking a bribe as an impeachable offense for a president.)
There’s a statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of such bribes: Prosecution must begin within five years of the deed.
So, my friends, if America gets a true Justice Department starting in January of 2029, Bezos’s inferno may become a reality.
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'Make Corporate Complicity Unprofitable': Boycott Targets Companies Tied to ICE
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said the head of Beyond the Ballot.
Nov 25, 2025
A Gen Z-led advocacy group fighting for working-class priorities on Tuesday announced a boycott campaign targeting major corporations "that enable, profit from, or directly collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the broader racist policies of the Trump administration."
Beyond the Ballot launched "Not With My Dollars: ICE Out of My Wallet" as President Donald Trump's violent crackdown on immigrants in diverse communities across the United States continues and just days before Black Friday kicks off the winter holiday shopping season.
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said Victor Rivera, the organization's executive director, in a statement. "Every dollar spent at a complicit corporation is a dollar funding the abduction and disappearance of our neighbors. It’' time to make corporate complicity unprofitable, for good."
The group is taking aim at e-commerce behemoth Amazon and its grocery subsidiary, Whole Foods; tech giants Dell and Microsoft; Home Depot; streaming platform Spotify; and retail chain Target. The boycott webpage explains the reason each is listed, actions shoppers should take, and the campaign's demands. In some cases, it also offers alternative companies.
Target is under fire for its "broad range of cooperation with the Trump administration's racist policies." The campaign is calling on the company to not only publicly commit to refusing collaboration with ICE but also immediately reinstate its scrapped diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Spotify is on the list for airing ICE recruitment ads—a decision that also recently prompted a boycott call from the group Indivisible.
The campaign site calls out Home Depot because it has "repeatedly allowed ICE agents to patrol and detain workers and customers in its parking lots and stores, usually without presenting judicial warrants or establishing probable cause," and demands an end to those practices.
The group is urging Microsoft to end its "$19.4 million contract with ICE to provide artificial intelligence capabilities and processing data." The Dell section highlights that it has provided $18.8 million to "support the office of ICE's chief information officer through the purchase of Microsoft enterprise software licenses," and similarly calls for terminating that contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Amazon section states:
REASON: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, selling the cloud power that helps track, target, and tear families apart.
ACTION: Stop shopping on Amazon where possible; cancel Prime subscriptions if feasible; push universities, unions, nonprofits, and campaigns to move off AWS when and where feasible, and to issue statements condemning Amazon’s role in corporate-sponsored mass deportations.
DEMAND: End all ICE/DHS immigration enforcement contracts and data hosting that enable deportations; adopt a binding human-rights policy banning support for immigration policing.
ALTERNATIVES: Bookshop.org and local bookstores; direct-from-brand purchasing; cooperatives; independent retailers.
The site also stresses that "every dollar spent at Whole Foods directly strengthens Amazon, whose AWS platform is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, powering the tools used to track, target, and tear families apart."
While the campaign is beginning just before Black Friday, boycott organizers aim to ensure it will "not disappear" after this week.
"Unlike other consumer boycotts, Not With My Dollars is designed for long-term pressure and escalation," Beyond the Ballot said. "To be removed from the boycott list, each targeted corporation must fulfill the specific demands outlined for its company. Anything less is not accountability, just more corporate PR."
"If you bankroll a violent, unaccountable agency that terrorizes our communities, you will not do it with our money," the group added. "Across the country, poor and working-class migrant families are facing a wave of state-sponsored abductions, violence, and political policing under the fascist Trump administration. Corporations that choose to partner with, advertise on, bankroll, or provide critical infrastructure to ICE are not neutral; they are complicit."
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