Teresa Ribera, a Spanish socialist who serves as executive vice president of the European Commission, threatened to throw out Europe’s trade deal with the United States in response to the Trump administration’s insistence that the European Union loosen its tech regulations.

She even threatened to renege on Europe’s commitment to purchase $750 billion worth of American energy.

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The “values” Ribera seems so eager to defend are, of course, censorship — especially of conservative viewpoints.

The EU’s Digital Services Act threatens digital companies and social networks with fines of up to 6% of global revenue unless they suppress any content EU bureaucrats deem “misinformation” or “hate speech.” An investigation by the House Judiciary Committee found companies would be forced to censor even run-of-the-mill statements such as “we need to take back our country.”

And because these platforms are global, censorship doesn’t just affect Europeans. According to the committee, “Commission regulators expect platforms to change their worldwide terms and conditions to comply with DSA obligations.” That means Americans get censored too.

Thankfully, the Trump administration won’t stand for this. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats in Europe to lobby their host countries to reform or repeal the DSA and threatened to withhold or revoke visas for “foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States.”

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said his agency will use U.S. consumer protection law to go after any tech company that censors Americans by complying with the DSA.

And now President Donald Trump is threatening additional tariffs against the EU unless they stop these grotesquely Orwellian practices.

“As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies,” he posted to Truth Social on Aug. 25. “Unless these discriminatory actions are removed, I, as President of the United States, will impose substantial additional Tariffs on that Country’s Exports to the U.S.A.”

Obviously, the EU’s treatment of American tech companies matters so much to America’s president that he is willing to risk blowing up one of his biggest trade deals over it.

A casual consumer of news could be forgiven for thinking the relationship between Trump and Big Tech seems a little schizophrenic.

He raged at Silicon Valley magnates for costing him the 2020 election by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story and for kicking him off their platforms shortly before he left office. “Zuckerberg should be in jail,” he told journalist Mollie Hemingway in an interview for her 2021 book, Rigged.

Then he invited those same tech tycoons to his inauguration, seating them in front of Cabinet picks. He also hosted those tech titans at a highly covered White House dinner last week.

The Trump administration has dropped some antitrust enforcement actions against Big Tech, but it is aggressively pursuing others.

Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Google all face high-stakes antitrust cases. Shortly before the 2024 election, a judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over online searches, but if company executives hoped Trump’s victory meant they’d get off easy, they were sorely disappointed. New antitrust czar Gail Slater pushed for the most aggressive remedies possible, including forcing Google to sell off its Chrome browser. The court recently ruled that Google did not need to divest Chrome but would have to make concessions to allow more competition.

So why is the Trump administration protecting Big Tech companies with one hand and bullying them with the other? In fact, there’s no contradiction here.

So far, the Trump administration has signaled its approach to antitrust will be assertive, but not indiscriminate or nakedly political. That means no more lawsuits like the Biden-era monopoly case against Visa, which stands accused of monopolizing debit transaction services despite no signs of wrongdoing and consumers having no shortage of ways to pay for things. Or the Biden DOJ’s ridiculous case against rent pricing software companies, blaming them for the housing inflation caused by the administration’s own policies. Both of these cases were little more than easy virtue signaling, ultimately at all our expense, for Biden to pretend to address the cost-of-living crisis he created.

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In sharp contrast, Slater and Ferguson can be counted on to be tough but fair. And when other countries mistreat our tech companies, and, by extension, their American users, Rubio will happily go to bat for them.

Ultimately, asking whether Trump is pro- or anti-Big Tech misses the point. He’s neither. He’s pro-free speech, pro-competition, pro-prosperity, and, above all, pro-American.

Dan Backer is a Washington-based political law attorney and conservative activist. He is a staunch defender and advocate at the forefront of free speech and associational rights and has served as counsel to more than 100 campaigns and candidates, PACs, and political organizations, including the largest grassroots-driven super PACs of the past two cycles, and over $100 million in pro-Republican political spending.