Marc Fisher

President Donald Trump’s decision in recent days to zero in on Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com as his latest Twitter targets has highlighted a severe fracture in American society, a divide between concrete and steel and zeros and ones, a split that is as much philosophical as it is economic, as much about the fraying of communities as it is about the shape of commerce.

Throughout Donald Trump’s business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.

“There was never any sense with Donald of the phone being used for private conversation,” said John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in the 1980s. For O’Donnell and others who have had regular dealings with Trump through the years, there was something viscerally real about the threat implied by the president’s tweet Friday morning warning that fired FBI director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” “Talking on the phone with Donald was a public experience,” said O’Donnell, author of a book about his former boss, “Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump.” “You never knew who else was listening.”