Comedian Steve Carell hosted Saturday Night Live last night, and Amazon’s announcement of the final selections for its secondary headquarters in Queens, New York and Crystal City, Virginia was the main focus of one sketch. In it, Carell portrayed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to explain the real reason why those two locations made the cut: to troll President Donald Trump.
Carell uses the sketch to paint a picture of Bezos using his company and wealth to try and humiliate Trump: “Sure, he attacked me repeatedly on Twitter, but I chose our new locations because they were ideal for growing business, not just to make Donald Trump think about how I’m literally 100 times richer than he is.” He goes on to tout another headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, right across from Trump’s resort at Mar-a-Lago, his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post — flashing a bunch of choice headlines — and “announces” a new delivery service called Amazon Caravan, in which anything being delivered to a Trump-owned building will be handed off by a large group of Honduran immigrants. He closes out by flicking a switch to project an Amazon logo on the White House.
It’s a goofy sketch that’s on the nose, but it highlights the speculation that Bezos and Amazon’s selections were motivated by a desire to deliver a giant middle finger to the president, who has been a frequent critic of Bezos and his company. After the announcement of the site selections, Trump told The Daily Caller that he felt that while the company took the best deals it got, that the cities were giving up a lot, and speculated that it could be a bad decision if Amazon’s fortunes decline. For his part, Bezos has criticized the President and his rhetoric, saying that it’s “dangerous to demonize the media.”
This article is from The Verge
