In a lead up to the last Presidential Election, one of the lies circulated by the Trump camp to befuddle plebs and rubes was that Trump 2.0 was going to be “serious about antitrust reform.” You didn’t have to look far for some baseless claims in the press (or by supposed experts like Matt Stoller) that Trump would “expand on the antitrust legacy of former FTC boss Lina Khan” or “rein in big tech.”
The evidence of this claim was paper thin. Most of it circled around Trump’s attacks on companies like Google and Meta. Which had less to do with any good faith interest in “reining in corporate power,” and everything to do with bullying them away from engaging in content moderation of racist right wing propaganda, hate speech, and election disinformation online (quite effectively, as it turned out).
Still, much of the press (especially the Politico, Axios, brunchlord DC gossip press routinely ran over-credulous stories claiming that the GOP was “serious about antitrust now,” falsely helping sell a second Trump term as something that would be hugely beneficial to the common man.
That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.
If you’ve been napping, grotesque levels of lobbying and corruption under Trump have hollowed out all federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. Numerous dangerous and precedent-ignoring Supreme Court rulings have declared that U.S. regulators no longer have the authority to make expertise-driven determinations to rein in corporate power.
Trump’s also mindlessly rubber stamping mergers everywhere you look, provided the companies prove they’re racist and sexist enough, or promise to take part in Trump’s ongoing attacks against U.S. journalism and the First Amendment.
At the same time, agencies like the FTC are wasting endless time on right wing zealotry, anti-trans harassment, and politically motivated investigations, while agencies like the FCC strip away whatever was left of broadband consumer protection enforcement and media consolidation limits.
Despite this, the press still can’t seem to help itself in propping up claims that the second Trump administration gives a fleeting shit about unchecked corporate power. Bloomberg, for example, just this week ran a story with this headline, despite the fact the actual story doesn’t support it:
You only have to make it a few paragraphs into the article to find that’s clearly not true:
“Yet nearly six months in, a more nuanced picture is emerging. Ferguson’s FTC reached settlements in several multibillion dollar megadeals and dismissed one Biden-era lawsuit altogether. He has acknowledged harm from mergers, but eschews the language of a traditional trustbuster, saying dealmaking can be “fuel for the fires of innovation.”
The only remaining remnants of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy has been the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t killed several of her prominent antitrust cases against tech giants like Meta and Google. But again, this isn’t because Trump wants to genuinely rein in corporate power, it’s because he wants to maintain leverage over companies that control the flow of online information.
The U.S. hasn’t taken antitrust reform and corporate oversight seriously in a generation, and the impact (especially on the labor and product enshittifcation front) is absolutely everywhere you look. Lina Khan, warts and all, was the closest we got to a real antitrust enforcer in decades. And the press, centrist Dems, billionaires, and Republicans all had a coordinated four year, full-diapered tantrum about it.
The entire Trump lie depends on the false claim that dim authoritarian zealots care about common Americans. That Trump is an actual populist. That he cares about the blue-collar interests of the working and middle class, most of whom have been pummeled for generations by bottomless U.S. corruption and unchecked corporate power.
Trumpism is a transparent farce to anybody with a few brain cells to rub together. But not even six months ago, prominent “antitrust experts” like Matt Stoller (buoyed by a 2023 puff piece in Politico framing him as a top political thinker of the age) were insisting the Trump FTC hiring choices (like the selection of JD Vance advisor Gail Slater to head the Trump FTC antitrust division) meant good things for corporate oversight:
“This is a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on Big Tech,” wrote Matt Stoller of Trump’s pick of Slater in a post on X. Stoller, who runs an anti-monopoly podcast and is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, added in his newsletter, “while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems [Trump] is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival.“
Since then, Trump has illegally fired both Democratic FTC Commissioners. His FTC hires have stood mute as numerous, populist and popularist policies (from the FTC’s effort to make cancelling services easier to the Khan FTC ban on shitty noncompete restrictions) were destroyed. The FCC and DOJ have rubber stamped a long line of shitty mergers, again provided the companies demonstrate satisfactory levels of racism and blind fealty to our idiot king. Most companies have been happy to oblige.
There are some genuine populists embedded within the Trump regime, but they’re never going to overcome the administration’s signature corruption and incompetence to actually accomplish anything. And they’re too feckless to actually do anything as their ideals are trampled underfoot (this story about some DOJ staffers whining as they rubber stamp another T-Mobile merger demonstrates this well).
I really did try very hard to warn people what was coming. Trump 2.0 was always going to be a devastating but deadly clown show that took a hatchet to corporate oversight, labor law, environmental protection, and corporate oversight. It was never subtle. It’s going to kill a lot of people. Anybody who claimed otherwise holds significant responsibility for the widespread suffering and bloodshed to come.