President Trump’s Department of Justice recently intervened in a case accusing tech giants and media outlets of colluding to silence conservatives, including a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. These companies weren’t protecting us from “misinformation.” They were protecting their own power.
Trump’s DOJ is not cozying up to these media giants like plenty of other past Republican administrations would have. It’s fighting back.
This single case undercuts the lazy narrative that the Trump administration is soft on monopolies or in the pocket of Big Tech. It also shows a deeper shift underway — one where Republicans have stopped reflexively defending corporate power and started taking aim at the kinds of concentrated private empires that censor speech, crush competition, and tilt the playing field against ordinary Americans.
Yet Democrats are still clinging to a lazy caricature of the Trump administration as a bunch of corporate errand boys cozying up to monopolies. That might have been an easy talking point to make about Republicans for a high school civics debate years ago, but it has nothing to do with the Trump administration today.
The loudest attacks have been aimed at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, fueled by the false claim that Trump is handing out political favors to monopolies. It might sound good in a left-wing X post, but it’s wholly divorced from reality.
How many Trump staffers do you see pushing free trade for big business? How many are cozying up to Big Tech? By my count: zero.
I know the people running antitrust at the Trump DOJ and FTC. I know how they think. And I can tell you this: They’re tougher on corporate power than any other administration in living memory.
Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater proved it in her first major speech this spring at Notre Dame when she said, “[W]e are experiencing the emergence of new durable forms of monopoly power.” She made clear that under President Trump, the GOP has shifted its focus away from protecting “big business” and toward defending the working class from concentrated power, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or Washington.
FTC Commissioner Mark Meador drove the point home just days later, declaring, “[C]onservatives should reject a laissez-faire or libertarian approach to antitrust law that inverts first principles, rejects the responsibilities of governance, and reflexively turns a blind eye to efforts to accumulate private power at any cost.”
And then he stripped away any pretense with three words: “Big is bad.”
Yet despite this, critics such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., still call Trump’s team corporate lapdogs. Their “proof” is laughable.
Take the Justice Department’s positions on the HPE–Juniper merger. Its critics, such as Warren and Booker, leave out that Trump intelligence officials backed the deal because it created a strong American alternative to Huawei, the Chinese Communist Party proxy trying to dominate global telecommunications. They also ignore that the monopoly claims in that case were so weak that legal experts argued pushing it to court might have backfired, weakening DOJ and FTC’s Section 7 authority to challenge real monopolies in the future.
Others have griped about a few other deals the DOJ let go through. But none of them harmed consumers, so why would Trump’s team block them?
Make no mistake: Trump’s team is tougher on monopolies than Biden’s ever was. The difference is that their enforcement is driven by the law, not by politics.
As Slater put it in an interview this spring, “There was a perception … that a lot of deals were being held up for a long time, unnecessarily … And that was leading to inefficiencies,” which hindered “deal flow.” The Trump administration’s approach is different. It wants to leave innocent businesses alone so it has more time and resources to go after the real bad actors. And that’s exactly what it’s doing.
Just look at Facebook. In March, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered up $450 million (later increased to $1 billion) to settle the FTC’s case against Meta, believing Trump might bail him out. Instead, Trump let the FTC proceed to trial, where Zuckerberg himself had to take the stand. And internal emails, like the one where Zuckerberg admitted buying Instagram to “neutralize” his competitor, became front-page evidence.
Trump’s antitrust team isn’t running an ideological crusade, nor is it cutting deals for its friends. It’s doing what law enforcement is supposed to do: protect consumers, safeguard competition, and put America first.
Democrats can keep peddling their cartoon version of Trump, but it won’t change the facts. This administration is proving you can be tough on corporate power without embracing the Democrats’ regulatory overreach. You can approve a merger that strengthens America’s national security while still hammering companies that abuse their dominance. You can refuse to weaponize antitrust and still be the toughest cop on the beat.
President Trump’s antitrust team isn’t pro-monopoly. They’re pro-consumer, pro-competition, and pro-America.