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Guilty! Trump delivers orange justice to Amazon

Billionaire dons self-stitched black cap to proclaim antitrust sentence

Donald Trump has launched a stinging attack on Amazon after the Bezos-owned Washington Post launched an investigation into his background.

In an interview on Fox News, the Republican's party's pick for president claimed a group of over 20 journalists at the Post were investigating his entire life.

Far from an act of the power-checking Fourth Estate, however, The Donald has declared it a ploy by Jeff Bezos to discredit his presidential run in order to curry favor with Washington politicians.

"Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed," claimed Trump.

"He's getting absolutely away, he worries about me - and I think he said that to somebody who was in some article - where he thinks I would go after him for antitrust because he's got a huge antitrust problem."

Trump said that Jeff Bezos bought the paper for "practically nothing" - or as us lesser mortals put it, $250m – and was using the paper as a political tool against him and other people to further its ends; specifically getting protection from antitrust and tax investigations.

Amazon is running a monopoly, Trump claimed. "What he's doing is wrong and the people are being - the whole system is rigged whether it's Hilary or whether it's Bezos."

This isn't the first time Trump has locked horns with Amazon. The unusually haired candidate excoriated Amazon in December last year, while making comments that the US should shut down parts of the internet to stymie terrorists. Bezos was unimpressed.

In February Trump again railed against Amazon, promising that the company would "have problems" if he was elected. Amazon was avoiding tax, he claimed.

Amazon isn't the first tech company to have aroused the ire of Donald Trump either. The presidential candidate promised to hammer Apple for not manufacturing its iPhones in the US with a 35 per cent import tax and thinks the company should have backdoored its operating system to help the FBI. ®

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