Antimonopoly Under Trump 2.0 – Rule of Law or Rule of Trump?
Senior reporter Karina Montoya writes about the Biden-Harris administration’s transformative antimonopoly efforts, their enduring impact on U.S. competition policy, and the uncertain prospects for continued enforcement under President Trump.
Over the course of four short years, the Biden-Harris administration revolutionized how the U.S. regulates corporate power and behavior, in ways that helped to make the U.S. economy more fair, open, inclusive, and sustainable. They did so mainly by restoring America’s strong antimonopoly philosophy to competition policy and hiring the most aggressive antitrust enforcers the nation has seen in decades.
As President Trump takes office early next week, there is some reason to believe his team may embrace a similar approach. This confidence increased after Trump nominated Gail Slater to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission, and nominated Mark Meador for the FTC’s open seat. All three are viewed as moderately to strongly sympathetic to the antitrust enforcement philosophy of Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan.
This feeling was reinforced earlier this week during the Senate hearing on Trump’s nomination of Pamela Bondi to head the U.S. Department of Justice. In response to a question by Senator Amy Klobuchar as to whether she would continue ongoing antitrust cases against Apple and RealPage for example, Bondi responded, “I'm committed to that type of case and protecting consumers."
It would be prudent, however, to be realistic about the prospects for strong antimonopoly action under Trump. No matter how well intentioned, enforcers working for Trump may find themselves with much less freedom than their peers in the Biden administration. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the institutional and philosophical gains of the last four years will be reversed—at least at the federal level
either by the White House, Republicans in Congress, or both.
A far better indicator of future policy may be the statements of Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, signaling he will use the agency to boost Elon Musk’s interests (whose business deals Carr has publicly praised) and to target Trump critics in broadcast television and elsewhere. Another potential indicator that Trump will take a radically different approach is his acknowledgement, in a press conference last week, that Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to Facebook’s content moderation policies are a direct result of Trump’s threat last August to imprison Zuckerberg “for life,” unless he did “the right thing.”
Even absent such a worst-case scenario, and the Trump DOJ and FTC do carry on with aggressive action against Big Tech, that does not mean they will follow Khan and Kanter’s strong enforcement against the rest of corporate America. Indeed, dealmakers across the nation expect a surge in mergers and acquisitions activity in media, retail, energy, defense, food and beverage, and childcare—the latter led largely by private equity.
The good news is that the Biden-Harris antimonopoly revolution has opened a door that will be all but impossible to completely shut. Aggressive antitrust actions by the Biden administration have reached all sectors of the economy, and they have reminded the American people of the government’s key role in protecting them as citizens, workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers from politically and economically dangerous concentrations of power.
Similarly, Kanter and Khan’s aggressive enforcement actions—and dramatic rewriting of the enforcement philosophy contained in the government’s Merger Guidelines—forced judges across the federal and state governments to study up on this vast suite of pro-democracy laws, often for the first time in their lifetimes.
The most immediate reason for hope is that the many lawsuits filed by Khan and Kanter—often in tandem with U.S. state attorneys general—are now working their way through courts and will be hard to stop, even if the White House directly tries to interfere. The Google Search case, for example, has many states as co-plaintiffs, each of which must sign off on any settlement, independent of the DOJ. Similarly, in the DOJ’s lawsuit charging Google with a monopoly over ad-tech, foreign governments ranging from the European Commission to the UK to Canada have taken steps to piggyback on the U.S. actions.
Other lawsuits likely to move forward regardless of Trump policy include the price-fixing case against RealPage, led by both the DOJ and eight other states (recently revamped by the DOJ to include landlords as defendants); the crackdown against Amazon’s online retail monopoly spearheaded by the District of Columbia and California state attorneys general and joined later by the FTC; and the DOJ cases against Apple and LiveNation-Ticketmaster, which also have several states as co-plaintiffs.
All of which means that in the year ahead, competition policy will remain very much a major focus of both debate and action.
This article was featured in The Corner Newsletter: January 17, 2025
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