Embed Notice

#Peltz, the billionaire who hosted fellow Republican donors in Palm Beach,
also had direct access to the White House.

A few months after Trump’s Inauguration, he met privately with the President in the Oval Office, presenting him with a written dossier that made the case that Amazon
and its owner, Jeff Bezos,
were responsible for the economic woes of the U.S. Postal Service.

Trump, who had long attacked Bezos as the proprietor of the Washington Post,
summoned a senior official to hear Peltz’s complaint.

According to the official, Peltz told Trump that
“the reason why the Post Office is in the red is almost entirely because of Amazon,”
claiming, falsely,
that it received preferential rates,
benefitted from “unfair competition,”
and ought to be considered an antitrust violator.

Trump’s staff tried to figure out what Peltz’s interest was in the matter.

It turned out that Trian Fund Management, Peltz’s asset-management firm,
had recently taken a $3.5-billion stake in Procter & Gamble,
the consumer-products giant.

Peltz, an activist investor who buys his way into corporate-leadership roles,
often by prompting proxy fights,
considered Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods a threat to his business.

On December 29, 2017, Trump tweeted,

“Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!”

...
#Isaac #Perlmutter, the former head of Marvel Entertainment,
which he sold to Disney, in 2009, for $4 billion,
was also at Peltz’s breakfast for Trump in Palm Beach.

(Trump personally introduced the pair at Mar-a-Lago, where Perlmutter has a regular table next to the ex-President’s;

last year, Peltz and Perlmutter joined forces when Peltz launched an unsuccessful bid to win a seat on Disney’s board.)

Perlmutter donated $5 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign;

his wife, #Laura, was a member of Trump’s Inauguration committee.

Soon after Trump became President, he installed Perlmutter and two of Perlmutter’s friends from Florida as de-facto overseers of the Department of Veterans Affairs,
an agency with an annual budget of some $200 billion.

“On any veterans issue the first person the President calls is Ike,”
a former Administration official told ProPublica, which revealed the arrangement.