The relationship between Amazon and Trump: profiting from power

In this article we explain why joining Ethical Consumer’s boycott campaign of Amazon can be a way to express more than just a disapproval of its UK tax avoidance.

Amazon's political ties

Amazon might be better known for its delivery vans than political manoeuvring, but the company’s history with Donald Trump and right-wing power structures reveal how oligarchs don’t just benefit from authoritarian rule, they build the infrastructure for it. As Trump’s second presidency continues, it’s worth re-examining Amazon’s political ties and why campaigning against them remains urgent. 

Amazon has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, sent Jeff Bezos to the 2025 inauguration to sit in billionaire’s row, and has since spent millions on lobbying for tax cuts, surveillance contracts, and union-busting protections. In the latest in a line of deals, Amazon will pay a reported $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump, most of which will line the pockets of the Trump family. 

Despite the press pageantry about Trump’s feud with The Washington Post owner, the reality is simple. Amazon has always benefited handsomely from the Trump agenda: Deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on labour, surveillance expansion. 

With Trump back in office and pushing through a second round of cuts that will keep capital gains taxes low and corporate loopholes wide open, Amazon stands to gain again, without putting anything back into the systems it exploits. 

Trump’s tax cuts help fund Amazon’s union busting

Amazon is a perfect case study of how a rigged tax system expands the power of corporations and the wealthy over both our economy and democracy itself. 

Trump’s 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, handing billions to companies like Amazon while claiming it would boost wages and investment. In reality, Amazon has barely lifted its median worker pay in the US (up just 3.3%) since 2018. Over the same period, the company paid an average effective US tax rate of just 5%. 

Fair Tax Foundation also found it to be the worst tax avoider globally of all big six tech firms. 

Most recently, Trump pushed through the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill” – a sweeping expansion of the same corporate handouts – with critics renaming it what it is: “Big, Ugly Bill”. It locks in capital gains loopholes, preserves the 21% corporate rate, and ensures that billionaires like Bezos continue to pay less tax (proportionally) than warehouse workers. 

Amazon provides a telling example of the real cost of these giveaways – not just in lost public revenue, but in political power. The company hasn’t used its windfall to invest in its workforce. Instead, it has poured millions into union-busting campaigns: hired an army of lobbyists to block labour reform, flooding warehouses with anti-union propaganda, and using surveillance to intimidate union organisers. Between 2021 and 2024, workers in Alabama and New York faced retaliation, misinformation, and illegal interference simply for trying to organise. 

Now, with Trump’s new appointments at the National Labour Relations Board and a Republican-led Congress preparing to gut labour protections, Amazon’s war on workplace democracy has found the perfect political climate. 

It’s no coincidence that when corporations and authoritarian governments share the same enemies – workers, unions, democracy – they stop operating as separate entities and start to look like partners. Amazon doesn’t just fear collective bargaining, it funds the political regime that dismantles it.

Amazon surveillance tech and ICE 

Nowhere is Amazon’s complicity more visible than in its role in the expansion of the U.S. deportation machine. Its power lies in the cloud – through Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s lesser-known but most profitable division. 

AWS provides cloud infrastructure to dozens of U.S. government agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the local police departments and notoriously, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Through Palantir – a key ICE contractor – Amazon has played a central role in building the tech stack that powers mass deportation. 

During Trump’s first term, AWS-hosted platforms were used to track families, detain immigrants, and facilitate the separation of children from their parents. In 2025, those tools are back in use and Amazon is still profiting. The “zero tolerance” policy has returned and ICE is once again targeting immigrants, international students, and farmworker organisers – this time with a more sophisticated, data-driven arsenal. 

It seems the Trump regime doesn’t just use Amazon, it aspires to be Amazon – as the head of ICE put it: “We want (the deportation process to look like) Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” 

A marketplace for hate 

Amazon has also profited from the far-right’s cultural agenda – reportedly selling banned books, conspiracies, and hate-filled manifestos under the banner of “free speech.” 

At the same time, in states like Texas and Florida, where public institutions are banning books on racism, gender and LGBTQI+ lives, Amazon steps in to profit from private sales. While on a practical level this means individuals can still access progressive books that are being censored elsewhere, clicking ‘buy’ also means funding the very company that is profiting from - and in many cases platforming - the discrimination those books exist to resist. While public access is stripped away, Amazon has monetised the backlash, earning from both the censorship and the culture war that fuels it. 

Amazon's algorithms have promoted antisemitic and white nationalist titles, while refusing to take meaningful responsibility. The company has resisted calls to regulate dangerous content unless pressured by mass media attention.    

As schools and libraries are censored under Trump’s second term, Amazon positions itself as the buyer of last resort – making profit from the collapse of public access. 

Amazon’s climate back-pedalling to align with Trump agenda

The political realignment goes beyond Amazon’s contracts and marketplace. Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate fund – once pitched as a commitment to sustainability – has withdrawn support from one of the world’s leading climate certification bodies. The Bezos Earth Fund ended its core funding for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in late 2024, just as Trump returned to power and ramped up attacks on climate regulation. 

While the Fund claims the three-year grant simply expired, advisers within the SBTi, along with climate researchers, have raised concerns that this is part of a broader billionaire retreat from public climate commitments – a retreat driven by fear of political backlash and alignment with Trump’s anti-climate agenda. 

As one expert put it, “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.” The decision mirrors Amazon’s broader political strategy: protect the brand, avoid confrontation with the state, and step back from anything that might threaten access to power. 

Why we boycott Amazon

Amazon is not politically neutral. It is a key example of how monopolies use power to tilt the political system further in their favour – and how that system, in turn, protects them from accountability. 

When Amazon reportedly floated the idea of displaying U.S. import charges on its product pages, a move that would have made Trump’s revived China tariffs more visible to consumers, the plan was quickly dropped following direct talks with the White House. A reminder that in this administration Amazon and Trumpism is a partnership. 

Boycotting Amazon is not just about tax justice or ethical alternatives. 

It’s about breaking the cycle between corporate wealth and political authoritarianism and refusing to fund the infrastructure of repression, surveillance, and exploitation. If we want to challenge the rise of authoritarianism, we must challenge the companies that make it profitable.