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COLLISION OF POWER: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post. By Martin Baron. Flatiron Books. 560 pages. $34.99.

Martin Barons Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post is actually a trilogy an insiders revealing examination of Jeff Bezos stewardship of The Washington Post, a chronicle of how Donald Trump tried mightily to discredit the Post and sink Amazon, and a tense, sometimes thriller tale of how the Post navigated a perilous time in journalism.

In all the tumult, Bezos emerges as determined, disciplined, analytical, focused, strategic in his thinking and remarkably calm as a perpetually angry Trump relentlessly used his presidential pulpit to attack Amazon. Bezos founded Amazon but it is unconnected to the Post, which Bezos bought with his own funds and in Barons telling, seems to genuinely relish owning.

Baron, executive editor of the Post from 2013-2021, clearly has researched extensively and thought deeply about how to cover the unprecedented presidency of Donald Trump. Baron writes that he needed to get myself ready for his brand of presidency and cites the books he read on authoritarianism and the manipulation of public opinion.

Among the books he read: How Democracies Die, published by two Harvard professors in 2018.

For a time, Trump took to calling Baron at all hours, complaining in one call that a Post piece depicted him as slob and little boy. Baron said the president then informed him that he was not a little boy.

In a case that contained scenes reminiscent of a movie thriller, Post reporters followed a woman they had come to suspect was trying to entrap the Post in a sting operation designed to discredit a Post investigation into Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Ultimately, Baron writes, it was Project Veritas, infamous for setting up stings to expose what it considers the liberal bias of mainstream media that Post reporters exposed as the organization behind the effort to discredit the paper.

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Review: 'Collision of Power' explains the journalism of the Donald ... - Charleston Post Courier