Jeff Bezos's film "Melania" is a huge bribe.

Click here for Robert Reich's Substack entry for February 2, 2026, entitled: "Melania: The Movie. The Bribe. The Shame," subtitled "Bezos's illegal payoff."

 He starts: 

I haven’t seen it. I hope you don’t, either.

This, from one of the kinder reviews:

“Across some 104 minutes, the first lady delivers these blatantly scripted and meaningless narrations with all the conviction of someone who just woke up from a two-hour nap and can’t remember what day it is.”

Reich states:

My purpose today is less to highlight this inane excuse for a film than to talk about its real excuse — allowing Jeff Bezos to give a big fat bribe to the president of the United States. 

He goes on to state some of Bezos's business ventures that are dependent on Trump's goodwill -- for example,  "Bezos’s Amazon Web Services has a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration for cloud services, which presumably Bezos would like renewed."

He says he hopes American business leaders who knuckled under to Trump will be "condemned to the hellfire they deserve for helping destroy American democracy." In this category he lists Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry and David Ellison, Shari Redstone and the board of Paramount; Bob Iger, CEO of Disney; Debra O'Connell, president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks; Elon Musk; Tim Cook of Apple, crypto magnates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; oil tycoon Harold Hamm; Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman -- but especially Jeff Bezos: "Jeff Bezos, with his $75 million bribe of Trump, will deserve a special place in the innermost ring of hell."

The $40 million he paid Melania Trump’s production company is at least $35 million more than the cost of typical high-end documentaries. (By way of comparison, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films produced “RBG,” a documentary about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for around $1 million.)

Melania Trump pocketed more than 70 percent of that $40 million — or more than $28 million — the Journal reported.

The additional $35 million Bezos shelled out for marketing “Melania” is 10 times what other high-profile documentaries spend on marketing. The promotional budget for “RBG” was about $3 million. (To be sure, Melania Trump is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I suppose you might argue that Melania needed a larger promo budget. But this much larger?)

He concludes by saying "Melania" was never a financial investment:

Of course it’s an outright bribe.

If America still had a Department of Justice, Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions. Penalty: imprisonment for up to 15 years.

(Also note: The U.S. Constitution lists taking a bribe as an impeachable offense for a president.)

There’s a statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of such bribes: Prosecution must begin within five years of the deed.

So, my friends, if America gets a true Justice Department starting in January of 2029, Bezos’s inferno may become a reality.