Democrats and the anti-Trump media are falsely claiming the Trump antitrust team has abandoned “MAGA antitrust” because of a few mundane approvals of mergers that Joe Biden’s political appointees and career staff opposed.
The Wall Street Journal claims that the “MAGA Antitrust Agenda Under Siege by Lobbyists Close to Trump.” Democratic Big Tech lobbyist Adam Kovacevich wrote, “MAGA Antitrust” was perverted to “just helping Trump friends and hurting his enemies.” Leftist website Uprise complained the “populist promise of a ‘MAGA Antitrust’ regime has disintegrated, revealing an administration that looks stunningly similar to that of George W. Bush.”
Since Trump took office, the FTC and Justice Department’s Antitrust Division have won huge victories against Big Tech and the censorship cartels. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson took Meta to trial, expanded the investigation against Microsoft, got two of the largest ad agencies to stop colluding to exclude conservative voices, and opened an antitrust investigation into Media Matters and other ad cartels. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater filed a statement of interest with Ferguson against ESG collusion and won an antitrust case against Google.
However, to bad-faith Democratic critics, “MAGA Antitrust” is not attacking Big Tech, ESG, and censorship cartels, but maintaining the same failed anti-business policies of Biden’s FTC Chair Lina Khan. Specifically, they complain that the Trump Justice Department settled or dropped antitrust cases against three mergers: UnitedHealth and Amedisys, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks, and the American Express Global Business Travel and CWT merger. The Biden administration filed the American Express and United Health lawsuits and prepared the HPE case, which the acting antitrust chief filed just days after taking over due to a statutory deadline.
No one should be surprised that Trump’s antitrust enforcers revisited these decisions. Ferguson pledged to “stop Lina Khan’s war on mergers.” Slater has emphasized she rejects both the Bush era and the Biden era antitrust rules.
These cases were obvious cases to settle or drop. Even the far more progressive EU and UK approved the Amex and HPE mergers. After HPE merged, it was less than half the size of the largest competitor in the network-cloud market Cisco, and made up less than 30% of the market.
Moreover, National security concerns led to the Justice Department settling the case. Axios reported, “U.S. intelligence community intervened to persuade the Justice Department that allowing the merger to proceed was essential to helping U.S. business compete with China’s Huawei Technologies.” Indeed, Breitbart previously noted that top Trump-aligned national security experts raised these very same concerns.
Nonetheless, the media and Democrats are crying foul. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the case that “Reporting has also raised procedural concerns” that HPE “hired lobbyists friendly to the White House.” Ranking House Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), wrote a letter to Attorney General Bondi about the case that absurdly cited deleted tweets by Laura Loomer, which made wild conspiracy theories about Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizzelle, and his family.
Unfortunately for the Democrats and fortunately for America, the Tunney Act is a law that requires a Judge to review merger consent decrees so “that the entry of such judgment is in the public interest.” The judge cannot consider “procedural concerns” much less some deleted Laura Loomer tweets.
Real MAGA antitrust means “standing up to Big Tech censorship, DEI-wokeism, and the anti-business, anti-innovation agenda of the radical Left,” as Andrew Ferguson described it. The Trump antitrust team is following through on this agenda.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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