It is tempting to view the blow-up between Amazon’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and David Pecker, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, with the peculiar glee some journalists experience when they cover a natural disaster: it can be exciting, fun even, to sit back and observe the flames.

As political earthquakes go, the Bezos-Pecker face-off is spectacular, since Pecker is a long-time ally of Donald Trump and Trump is the sworn enemy of Bezos and the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post.