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Three years, $277 million. That’s more than Bezos paid for the entire paper when he bought it in 2013. And yet, the financial damage is only part of the story.
D’Onofrio also disclosed that story output has dropped 42% since 2020, even as costs soared 16% over the last five years. In short, the Post hired aggressively during the Trump years, output tanked, and the money kept flowing anyway.
The Great Awokening: How “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Became a Spending Spree
These weren’t random hires. These were the glory days of the Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era—a time when every available progressive journalist was recruited to wage a cultural and political war against Trump and MAGA America.
The results? Less journalism, more activism. Stories about “racist birds,” glowing profiles of drag queens, and viral hoaxes like the Elon Musk “Nazi salute” or the fabricated ICE detaining a five-year-old.
After February’s layoffs, which eliminated nearly 45% of the newsroom, the unemployed journalists flooded social media. Their work? Two or three articles a month, many co-written, mostly content nobody outside Washington noticed—or believed.
Lies and woke propaganda don’t sell. The Post’s own numbers prove it.
Bezos vs. the Paper He Bought
Consider the irony: the Post spent a decade demonizing Donald Trump, starting the moment he descended that escalator in 2015. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was less a slogan than a full-time mission against a president repeatedly endorsed by voters.
Yet Trump thrives. His approval ratings are rising, his policies advancing, and meanwhile, the Post has fired half its staff, shuttered its sports desk, axed the books section, and eliminated its entire Middle East bureau—including a war correspondent who learned of her firing mid-deployment.
Bezos himself has changed sides. He sat behind Trump at the 2025 inauguration, blocked the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris, hosted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at his rocket company, and even donated $1 million toward Trump’s inauguration.
The man who bankrolled “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is now cozy with the president his paper spent a decade vilifying. Meanwhile, the journalists who spent years tearing him down are lining up at unemployment offices.
The Collapse of an Audience
The Post’s digital audience has cratered, dropping from 114 million unique visitors in November 2020 to just 54 million by November 2024. Readers voted with their clicks after being fed falsehoods and woke nonsense repeatedly.
Executive Editor Matt Murray confirmed the decline, telling a media summit:
“No more Trump bump” and that the Post is “not a paper of record” anymore.
The once-loud sentinel of American democracy has admitted it no longer holds itself accountable to standards of completeness or accuracy.
The Bezos Decision That Broke the Post
Journalists begged Bezos not to enact the layoffs. Letters poured in, but he never responded.
The newsroom now numbers just 500, down from nearly a thousand. Sports, books, foreign bureaus—gone. One war correspondent was terminated mid-deployment.
Murray said the surviving staff will now focus on politics and national security, chasing the same Trump-obsessed readers who abandoned the paper in droves.
In short, the people who spent a decade warning of Trump’s supposed destruction of America were spectacularly wrong—and they were paid $277 million to be wrong. Now, the fallout is undeniable.
