If you step back far enough, you might be able to see some compatibility between a Trump presidency and strong antitrust policy. Gotta lower those egg prices somehow, right? But as you get closer, his affinity for deregulation and putting big business at the front row of his inauguration makes it a little harder to square the theories that usually go behind using antitrust law as a tool to fight for the average consumer. While Making Antitrust Great Again isn’t an impossible road to travel, the terrain is looking pretty rough. CBS News has coverage:
Internal friction with the Justice Department team that fights monopolies has led to private conversations in the Trump administration about whether to push out some staff in the antitrust division or to work to smooth out the issues, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.
Gail Slater, who in March took charge of lawsuits against Capital One, Apple, Google and other major companies as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, still has support from some top officials in the administration, but she and some on her team have been a target of criticism from colleagues and business leaders, sources inside and outside the administration told CBS News.
In a related article, Politico managed to get some imput that puts some of the tension in focus:
“The Republican Party has two forces within it,” Fiona Scott Morton, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama DOJ’s antitrust division, told DFD. “The money people, corporations who want to be allowed to merge anytime … and then there’s the populists who are more against large corporations.”
The really interesting bit is that Trump could be the final decision maker at the end of the day. It’s a little attenuated, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that Elon’s plan of having the FTC and DOJ antitrust departments collapse in on each other and the DOJ becoming the primary antitrust agency goes through. Trustbustin’ would be weakened generally, but the DOJ would still retain the authority to carry out criminal antitrust cases. Say there’s some egregious anti-competitive business practicing afoot and Zuckerberg or Bezos or their companies are hit hard with a Sherman Act violation and fined millions of dollars. Couldn’t Trump just… pardon them after the fact? And even if he has some bad blood with a billionaire that could get hit with an antitrust violation *cough Elon cough*, surely it’s nothing an anonymous investment in Trump’s memecoin couldn’t fix. He already extended the pardon power to corporations back when he pardoned BitMEX after it violated the Bank Secrecy Act. The presidential pardon could act as a strong check and balance that cuts in the favor of big business.
Tension Over Antitrust Division Crops Up Inside Trump Administration, Sources Say [CBS News]
What ‘America First Antitrust’ means for Big Tech [Politico]
Earlier: DOJ And FTC Antitrust Enforcement May Get Merged Together
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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