The most disciplined decision I’ve made recently did not occur at 5 a.m. It wasn’t a juice cleanse or a digital detox. It wasn’t even resisting the urge to buy something I didn’t need with two-day shipping.
It was canceling Amazon Prime.
And the man who inspired me? Bezos. It was when Bezos praised Donald Trump as “more mature, more disciplined.” A sentence so detached from observable reality that I had to put my phone down, stare at the ceiling, and have a brief conversation with God.
When Jeff Bezos says Trump has “lots of good ideas” and is showing new “discipline,” it’s worth pausing to ask: ‘what ideas, exactly?’ Cutting regulations on massive corporations? Tax policy that makes yacht ownership more affordable? Because if that’s the scoreboard, then sure, great ideas, Jeff. Truly inspiring stuff.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan put it, this is billionaire-speak for “he is cutting my taxes and regulations.” Which, honestly, is at least coherent. Bezos isn’t moonlighting as a political scientist. He’s a man with a rocket ship and a newspaper. He’s protecting his shit. Totally understandable. Just don’t expect the rest of us to treat it as nonpartisan analysis delivered from above a mountain.
The “discipline” framing is especially ‘rich,’ as it comes from a man whose affair was broken not by a quiet conversation, but by the ‘National Enquirer.’ But sure. Let’s talk about character and self-control. Grab a chair.
The “more disciplined Trump” crashes into a wall of empirical evidence and bursts into flames. For instance, just recently, the President of the United States posted ‘fifty’ online texts in the span of ‘three overnight hours.’ Not fifty posts over a week. Not fifty posts during a national emergency. Fifty posts. Before breakfast. While the rest of America was asleep and the nation’s problems presumably were not.
To put that in perspective: fifty posts in three hours work out to one post every 3.6 minutes. Sustained. Through the night. That’s not discipline. That’s a man who should probably talk to someone.
I’m no presidential historian, but I’m fairly confident that “midnight posting marathon” doesn’t typically appear under the “Signs of Growth” column in a leadership review. That’s not a new Trump. That’s the same Trump with a slightly better tailor.
So, when Bezos calls this “disciplined,” the most charitable interpretation is that he simply isn’t online at 2 a.m. The less charitable interpretation is that he doesn’t care, because the regulatory relief is real and the posts are someone else’s problem. Probably yours.
Let me be honest with you. Canceling Prime does not bring Amazon to its knees. Jeff Bezos will not feel it. He will continue to launch himself (or his wife) into space. It’s a hobby that I cannot stress enough, is literally rocketing away from the rest of us while also owning a major newspaper and dispensing wisdom about political maturity.
Bezos made $75 billion during the pandemic. My $139 is a rounding error on a rounding error. He will be fine. But here’s the thing: it means something to ‘me.’
Consumers have remarkably few levers. We can’t vote in Amazon’s boardroom. We can’t match Bezos’s political access with our own. What we can do is decide where our money goes, and more importantly, where it doesn’t go. And right now, I’d rather not fund the infrastructure of a man who uses his platform to rehabilitate a figure whose idea of discipline is posting whack-job bullshit before sunrise. If every subscription is a vote of confidence, then my vote of confidence has been revoked.
This isn’t just Bezos. It’s a whole genre now. One by one, tech’s great visionaries — Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, others — have shuffled up to the microphone to offer praise that, a few years ago, would have seemed professionally suicidal. They’ve called it pragmatism. They’ve called it maturity. One of them brought a gift and sat in the front row.
It’s not maturity. It’s math. Tax rates, regulatory costs, and antitrust exposure. Money and power is the variables being optimized. The public commentary is just the wrapping paper. Beneath it is a very straightforward financial calculation that these men are more than capable of doing.
Rational? Sure. Admirable? Reader, I think you can work that one out yourself.
So Here We Are. I canceled Amazon Prime. It took whopping four minutes, saved $139, and gained something harder to put a price on. I won’t pretend it’s a revolution. It’s not. But every time I don’t have a Prime tab open, there’s a small, quiet satisfaction. It’s the kind that comes from acting in line with your values instead of just posting about them at 2 a.m.
If Jeff Bezos wants to define discipline as praising a man who rage-posts through the night while the country sleeps, that’s his prerogative. He’s earned the right to say strange things. He literally bought it.
I’ll define discipline my own way.
Starting with the cancel button.