It occurs to me that the political consequences of the failure of the Washington Post and LA Times to endorse Harris have been much more significant, and immediately positive, than their endorsements would have been. This is almost certainly unintentional, but let’s run with it.

If the papers had published their endorsements, it would have had almost no impact. It would have been predictable, unremarkable, and instantly forgettable. Instead, we have a dramatic and effective demonstration of the reality of the central message of the Harris campaign: that Trump is a fascist whose disrespect for the rule of law causes even oligarchs to bend the knee, and this event is reverberating widely. Actions speak louder than words: Bezos signaling that he is scared of Trump is much more potent than yet another politician using the “F” word.

From NYmag:

When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price. “If I become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned. Trump’s grievance with Amazon was centered on Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, a connection the president did nothing to disguise. […]

In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to “screw Amazon.”

This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.