The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Jeff Bezos issued an extraordinary tweet. He didn’t just congratulate Trump on his victory, he also went out of his way to hail Trump’s extraordinary political comeback. We think this is a bad sign of what’s coming. People in key institutional positions going out of their way to curry favor with Trump in advance. How bad is that going to get and what will the consequences be? Will Bunch, national columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a very good column about this, arguing that this bended knee to Trump suggests the beginning of America’s strongman era. So we invited Will on to talk about it. Good to have you on, Will.

Will Bunch: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Greg Sargent: First, I want to read the tweet from Jeff Bezos, who is in the top five richest people in the world and owns The Washington Post, where I used to work (laughs). It said this, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” Well, the line about Trump’s extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory is telling; that’s going out of his way to unctuously suck up to Trump by fluffing his comeback narrative, which Trump loves. What’s your reaction to all this?

Bunch: You’re right, Greg. It was an extraordinarily fawning tweet coming from a man who ... Obviously, first and foremost, he’s the founder of Amazon and that’s where his wealth comes from. But he’s the owner of The Washington Post, and he knows with the Post comes this watchdog responsibility to cover the new administration fairly. It’s something he’s aware of. He talked about it when he bought the paper back in 2013. You can question the wisdom of sending any tweet at all, but this just sounded so over-the-top.

And it’s fascinating because it comes in the wake of a big controversy, as probably lot of your listeners know about: The Post has been generally making endorsements in presidential races since Watergate, since 1976, and the editorial staff had prepared an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. They’d worked on it for a long time. At the last minute, Jeff Bezos told them not to publish it, [saying] that Hey, we decided we’re going to get out of the endorsement business. The timing raised a lot of eyebrows, but especially because, as it turns out, Amazon, the main source of his wealth, does a lot of business with the federal government. You wouldn’t necessarily think so, but they’re in the cloud computing business, and they have a large cloud computing business contract with [the federal government], among other things.

Jeff Bezos also, like his fellow billionaire Elon Musk, has this space venture called Blue Origin. It actually came out, and it may have been a coincidence–it probably was—but on the very day that Bezos told his editors not to publish the endorsement, some of these executives from Blue Origin actually met Trump at an event down in Austin, Texas.

One reaction to authoritarian regimes is people tend to not even take orders, but just in advance on their own, take actions that they think will please the authoritarian leader. Timothy Snyder from Yale calls this “obeying in advance.”

Sargent: He does. I want to bring up some other signs of our institutions getting weak-kneed in the face of Trump, both before the election and after. We just learned that the Department of Justice may be winding down its cases against Trump. It comes after the........

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