Amazon's Spending on 'Melania' Is a Barely Concealed Bribe | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's Spending on 'Melania' Is a Barely Concealed Bribe

daringfireball.net

264 pointslateforwork73 comments

The $28M to Melania personally is the tell. Amazon could've made this documentary for $5M and marketed it for $10M and still gotten whatever political cover they wanted. Instead they structured a deal where most of the money flows directly to the president's wife. That's not sloppy negotiating, that's the point. Someone at Amazon legal signed off on creating a paper trail that looks exactly like what it is.

Wait until they buy her book and sell it for free on Amazon

From Webster's 1913:

Sell: To transfer to another for an equivalent; to give up for a valuable consideration; to dispose of in return for something, especially for money.

Selling, even for free, implies demand.

Implies, but doesn't prove.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-tri...

I was attempting to say that it's impossible to sell something that has zero demand.

i.e. you can't "sell" something when you can't even give it away.

I would say there’s no concealment at all. It’s a naked bribe and flattery. But bribery is legal now.

I've heard that one of the advantages of this administration is that you don't need data or convincing arguments -- just bribery and flattery. If you're OK with bribery and flattery then you'll find this administration much easier to work with. Getting your way is a simpler path.

> But bribery is legal now.

Only because no one can prosecute it without retaliation from petulant man-children.

> bribery is legal now

It’s not. And it will probably be investigated by a future administration when we do a Nuremberg-style review of this term.

In the last decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bribery is de facto legal and impossible to prosecute (Kelly v. United States, McDonnell v. United States, FEC vs. Ted Cruz). And those were against relative nobodies, they certainly aren't going to permit charges against anyone in this administration.

None of those three cases have to do with bribery, at least not receiving bribes for official action. Here's some nuance: Kelly concerns retaliation, McDonnell concerns whether hosting meetings and events amounts to official action, and FEC concern the limit (was $250,000) on the amount of post-election contributions which may be used to repay campaign debts.

It's also worth noting that Kelly was unanimous and FEC upheld the ruling of the district court which the FEC had appealed.

It’s also worth noting that Bob Menende is in jail.

Here, I'll save you the trouble:

"Now isn't the time for recriminations for behavior long in the past, now is the time for forgiveness. Time to reach across the aisle in unity, time to heal the nation." - Democrats

Newsom is starting to get it. But it's lividly clear that a straight shot to the Democratic Presidential nomination, and probably the White House, is embracing the new Presidential powers Trump and the Roberts Court have spun up to pursue Democratic policy goals and retribution against MAGA's least popular.

Per the Roberts court I think those powers only work for Republican presidents, see Biden's successes on things like student loan forgiveness.

that's optimistic

There's enough to allow their followers to pretend it's all on the level, and for people who aren't paying much attention to ignore it. A direct bribe would make that quite a bit harder.

Even if it was, there are other ways to go. The emoluments clause would be my guess. This term is the auction off America plan. Go read the NPR article on the gutting of nuclear safety rules. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/g-s1-107650/up-first-newslett... Who needs easy access to nuclear reactors? Tech billionaires possibly... Would you want to live next to a Grok data center? Iterate quickly and fail fast is not really compatible with nuclear reactor design. At least rocket debris a relatively short window of danger.

> the gutting of nuclear safety rules.

Sadly, small beer now that nuclear containment has also expired and been cleared from the table.

The Last Nuclear Deal Is Expiring. Does Anyone Care? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821225

Nuclear Arms Race 2.0: Ready, Set, Already Go .. You're Late!

> bribery is legal now

emolument clause be dammed.

it turns out all you need to do is 1) blatantly ignore/violate the law, 2) have appointed justices to the court who will provide you will full immunity while in office (Trump vs United States)

As this is HN, I wonder what this implies for technology companies as a whole. It's easy to see how the Trillion dollar companies are engaged in this e.g. Tim Cook attended the premiere.

And we see how crypto companies court the Whitehouse through various mechanisms.

How might this factor into "mere" unicorn startups? I think it does but not sure how.

My guess is that if you're an early stage startup that isn't an AI company already worth billions, you can probably ignore this as noise and focus on building product. It's reasonably likely that by the time your startup is sufficiently large, there will be a new administration (because it takes a few years and presumably he will not be president in 2029).

I think one implication is that ad-driven tech companies are at great risk. In a political system where National Champion businesses are selected/assisted on the basis of bribery, advertising becomes irrelevant. Why spend money advertising Widget X when this widget is already the only one that's officially sanctioned?

109 points and [flagged].

Yeah, the mods usually hide behind “light moderation actions” while letting the “special” subset of audience they have cultivated run rampant and unchecked with quasi moderator abilities.

It takes extremely little to get the ability to flag content on HN accounts. It's not a subset, it's most anyone who contributes basically at all

A good reminder to check your AWS bill

“They’re spending $35 million now, to promote it”

No points for guessing which social media company got the bulk of that ad spend.

To my huge surprise, I saw an ad for it in person.

In a Berlin shopping mall.

What is the general perception of Melania in Berlin?

Probably similar as in the Londen première

https://www.ndtv.com/entertainment/melania-trumps-documentar...

Or anywhere else in Europe

The film? „Lächerlich floppt“, „Propaganda-Gag“, „Ironisch lächerlich“.

The person? „Nicht relevant“.

Sad :/

Still, for those that feel that way I can only recommend Klemen Slakonja's First Lady Melania Trump: sLOVEnia biopic that follows her return to the land of both her and Laibach's origin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHEPzEKTcss

What is sad?

In this specific case a hook or device to draw people in and perhaps watch a significantly shorter alternative biopic that might appeal to a Berlin audience who like to drag Melania.

No that's just in Germany in general. What is it with real Berliner schnauze?

This poster was in Schönhauser Alle Arkaden, in Prenzlauer Berg; in Prenzlauer Berg diskutiert man typischerweise, ob das Bio-Sauerteigbrot noch „authentisch“ genug ist, und die Hauptfragen am Straße sind nur "Haben Sie eine Feuerzeuge?" (or possibly "du", as I'm British, I have to think carefully about du/Sie, I don't naturally recall it).

Melania, in one word, "Egal". In two words, "Völlig egal".

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/media/amazon-mel... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46813657)

Previously:

Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded "Melania" screening at White House

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761370

I mostly don't blame Amazon. If the mob boss demands $10M in protection money in order to allow your $2.5T business to operate, you pay, especially if that mob boss happens to be the head of federal law enforcement.

Maybe we shift a bit of focus towards Congress, supreme courts and frankly voters who are apparently OK with this.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, Justice Robert’s wife earned $10 million as a “consultant.” The compensation made her one of the highest-paid legal recruiters. That's another "Melania movie".

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/wife-of-chief-justic...

Nah. You really think they are powerless?

Most of HN seems to be more than OK with it judging by the flagging and your downvotes.

yeah, it's honestly been surprising to me to discover that; I expected higher cognitive reasoning

I agree that we should be blaming the voters who decided that naked bribery and corruption is an American value (moreso than, say, their bleating about gun rights), but…

The people most capable of fighting back, and who ultimately have the most to lose in a kleptocratic, authoritarian state, apparently to be cowards and losers. Bezos and Jassy could tell the administration to pound sand, given how critical AWS is, and that Amazon is part of the like, 4 companies propping up the teetering stack of cards holding up the thing this administration (and its weaponized voters) think represents “the economy”. But they won’t, because they’re a bunch of feckless children, desperate for scraps.

I think they'd just move the business to Oracle?

… you think everyone currently using AWS would “just move to Oracle”, if the administration tried to retaliate against Amazon directly?

That’s quite the take.

Beyond a bribe it's just wicked propoganda at that. Was just stunned at this review,

> So, what’s the point? How does this superficial, wilfully deceitful reality readjustment serve the sociopathic ascension of Trump’s will (because everything has to)? Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be - and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner’s unrelentingly boring feature doc debut - only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe.

Ok, ice burn mostly so far. Expected. But:

> And I realised then what the point was - Trump is tightening his family business’ grip on the White House beyond his years and before our eyes. MELANIA is not the story of the First Lady of American politics, but the imagining of the first homeland monarch in U.S. history. This is not a film concerned at all with the America of today; it is propaganda that serves the formation of a future non-democracy.

I'm all too afraid that there is something truly wicked this boring dry flop of a movie will accomplish, over time, for some incredibly infernal anti-Democracy forces in the world. That one of the top 3 richest men in the world would give a messely couple million bucks for an anti-Democracy pro-Regal pro-Imperial project like this is perhaps unsurprising, beyond the simple dimension of grift it obviously presents.

https://screenspace.substack.com/p/the-animated-pics-vying-f... via the lovely https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mdncqwyuks2...

Author has conveniently ignored that the screenings were attended by the Apple CEO as well.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/white-ho...

You've conveniently ignored not just one but two prior posts referencing it.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/27/ceo-captured https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/27/mg-cook-melania

Amazon burned $250M just for the rights to produce the goofy and embarrassing "Rings of Power" series. I wonder who was bribed in that deal?

???

I think they implied the following argument, or something along the lines

  1. Assume that Amazon knows the future
  2. Then spending $250M on Rings of Power is a bad decision
  3. Therefore paying $28M to Trump is also just a bad decision, and not a bribery

I personally don't think that 1 holds, or that 2 implies 3.

There is a universe where Amazon can be both incompetent and corrupt, and we're living in it.

Some might argue the two traits go hand in hand

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