“I thought I was being punked,” a veteran agent told me after hearing the news that Amazon had agreed to pay an eight-figure tribute to license a Melania Trump documentary directed by the canceled filmmaker Brett Ratner. That agent was hardly the only one in shock. First, there was the price tag, as reported by my partner Matt Belloni. “$40 million? That’s absurd. Maybe $5 million,” an executive who has experience in the documentary space told me. The general assumption was that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, had discovered yet another avenue to work his way into Donald Trump’s deepest (and most crowded) orifice, weeks after pulling The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and earning a prized seat on oligarch’s row at the inauguration.