Trump 2.0 isn’t your granddad’s Republican administration.
On some issues, most notably trade, there’s an obvious contrast with his immediate GOP predecessors—and with what even Trump himself dared during his first term. On other issues, however, how to apply Trump’s nationalist-populist ethos remains an open question.
Does America First foreign policy mean leaving Iran alone? Or does it mean a hard Jacksonian right hook and no further entanglements?
Do mass deportations mean pursuing all illegals with equal ferocity right now? Or should we pause farm raids to protect American agri-business in the short term?
Among the most pressing of these policy questions is what form MAGA antitrust enforcement will take.
Aristotle said that virtue is the mean between two extremes, and that seems to be what Team Trump is aiming for. Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, who Trump appointed to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division, seems neither excessively deferential to big business nor reflexively hostile toward it.
In one interview, she said, “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign, we’ll just get out of the way,” while in a separate speech, she pledged to ignore “economists who are ideologically opposed to antitrust enforcement.”
So far, Slater has come down hard on Big Tech, pushing for strict penalties against Google that could end up dismembering the Silicon Valley giant, but it’s still not entirely clear how she’ll apply her principles moving forward.
Plenty of people, both inside and outside the administration, would be thrilled with a return to the old Republican pro-business approach, while others outside of it long for a continuation of the four-year progressive antitrust boondoggle we endured under Biden-era Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
Enter the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). Their website prominently features a quote from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Their team is stacked with progressives, including former Democratic candidates and alumni of the Obama and Biden administrations, the American Civil Liberties Union, and even Lina Khan’s own staff.
In short, the AELP seems to be populated entirely by people who want to block even the benign mergers Slater supports.
The progressive antitrust group came out against Trump-appointed FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson’s withdrawal of an enforcement case against PepsiCo that Ferguson described as a “nakedly political effort” that relied more on the company’s market share than on any demonstrable harm to consumer welfare.
AELP called the decision to drop the case “disturbing.”
In a separate release, AELP Senior Counsel Lee Hepner lamented the state of vertical merger scrutiny after Ferguson abandoned a long-shot attempt to roll back Microsoft’s acquisition of video game maker Activision-Blizzard. The entire case relied on a claim that the merger would jeopardize equal access to Call of Duty games. The case was absurd, but Microsoft played along, and the deal went through.
AELP, of course, still wasn’t happy, questioning the “adequacy” of signed agreements between Microsoft and rival console makers to keep Call of Duty a multi-platform franchise for the next 10 years.
If AELP were just impotently shouting these opinions into the wind like other left-wing think tanks under a GOP administration, it would be entirely harmless. The danger is that AELP is actively trying to insert its radical antitrust views into the America First coalition.
For example, AELP research director Matt Stoller, who Politico once described as “Washington’s angriest progressive,” wrote the antitrust enforcement chapter for Moving the Chains, a 2020 report on industrial policy compiled by influential New Right think tank The American Compass. He’s also been trying to buddy up to populist Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
Trumpism has reinvigorated the American right and challenged its departures from free-market fundamentalism, which were long overdue. But plenty of left-wing wonks and policy shops are eager to maintain their influence by pushing a version of populism that looks a lot more like socialism. MAGA Republicans should make sure they don’t fall for it.
Michael Busler is a public policy analyst and a professor of finance at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in finance and economics. He has written op-ed columns in major newspapers for more than 35 years.