Oct. 9, 2025, 5:44 p.m.
The Trump administration’s antitrust team has promised to walk a middle ground between the minimal enforcement of antitrust laws by previous Republican administrations and what they characterized as overzealous enforcement by the Biden administration.
Ideally, this “Goldilocks” approach would be open to settlements to solve antitrust disputes and would fast-track most mergers, but would use the full extent of the law to go after monopolies and powerful companies, particularly those in the tech world.
However, in the months since President Trump returned to office, the traditional wall between regulators and the Oval Office has broken down, and the president’s transactional approach to governing reportedly has allowed backroom deals to overrule decisions made by his chosen antitrust enforcers. That has caused many to worry that true antitrust enforcement won’t happen under his administration.
“Every time, the White House or its adherents seem to accomplish the successful political manipulation of the decision-making process that degrades [the antitrust enforcer’s] efforts to establish [themselves] as a principled alternative to Biden and Bush,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Mason University and a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.
For decades, as both Republicans and Democrats embraced the “consumer welfare standard,” antitrust enforcement fell by the wayside. The standard, first proposed in 1978, assesses consolidation of an industry based on price and quality of products. The belief in lax antitrust enforcement possibly reached its peak during the George W. Bush administration, which filed zero monopolization cases over 8 years.
Strict adherence to the consumer welfare standard started to shift towards the end of the first Trump administration. The Justice Department brought an antitrust case against Google, claiming it had a monopoly over search, while Trump’s FTC brought an antitrust case against Meta.
But the real change happened during the Biden administration, under the guidance of then-FTC Chair Lina Khan and then-head of the DOJ Antitrust Division Jonathan Kanter. Kanter continued his pursuit of the Google case, while filing his own cases against Google, Apple, and entertainment giant Live Nation. At the FTC, Khan refiled Trump’s case against Meta after a judge threw it out, and she filed a potentially landmark case against Amazon that could upturn the online retail market.
After the 2024 election, Trump nominated Gail Slater, a former staffer for now-Vice President J.D. Vance during his brief stint in the Senate, to lead the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, and he tapped Mark Meador as the third Republican commissioner on the FTC. Both were seen as antitrust advocates, a sign that Trump might indeed fulfill his populist antitrust promises.
Over the summer, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Slater said her goal was to find the middle ground between the Biden administration’s approach to antitrust and the laissez-faire approach of earlier administrations, where accepting settlements was standard fare.
The ‘Goldilocks’ approach
Kovacic described the Trump team’s approach as “Goldilocks antitrust—not too high, not too cold, just right.”
But markets have been hesitant to believe Trump’s rhetoric.
“The market seems to have not taken it completely seriously, thinking that mergers would probably become, on average, easier to contemplate or complete,” said Thomas Hazlett, an economics professor at Clemson University and a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission.
Belief in Trump as an antitrust crusader took hold within the first month of his second term when the Justice Department sued to block a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks, the second and third largest providers of Wi-Fi enterprise WLANs. Such a move so soon in the Trump administration was a boon for those who hoped the president would continue the transition towards tougher antitrust enforcement.
In June, DOJ settled the case and allowed the merger to go through with some conditions, a move the Biden antitrust team likely would have avoided. But rather than an example of the “Goldilocks” antitrust enforcement Slater championed, the settlement was reportedly forced on Slater after MAGA-aligned lobbyists called in favors from two of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s closest aides. Ultimately, two of Slater’s close advisors—Roger Alford and William Rinner—were fired over the internal antitrust dispute.
In August, speaking at the Technology Policy Institute Aspen Forum, Alford identified Chad Mizelle, Bondi’s chief of staff, and recently confirmed Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, as the two who forced the merger settlement through.
“For 30 pieces of silver, MAGA-in-Name-Only lobbyists are influencing their allies within the DOJ and risking President Trump’s populist conservative agenda,” Alford said. “Their goal is to line their own pockets by working for any corporation that will pay top dollar to settle antitrust cases on the cheap.”
After the merger went through, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case urging him to review and possibly throw out the settlement.
Bill Baer, a longtime antitrust enforcer and current visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it’s unlikely the judge will throw out the case. But he said the review process should cast necessary light on exactly what happened in the case and help ensure it won’t happen again under future DOJ antitrust agreements.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Klobuchar asked Bondi about the merger case. Bondi declined to provide details about the case but did say Slater was doing “an excellent job on many, many cases.”
“The Department has consistently reiterated that resolution of this merger was based only on the merits of the transaction,” DOJ spokesperson Gates McGavick told National Journal in an emailed statement.
‘That wall is clearly torn down’
According to Baer, the incident highlights a major shift in antitrust enforcement.
“For 50 years, we had a brick wall separating political actors from law enforcement decisions in antitrust and elsewhere in the government. And that wall clearly is torn down,” Baer said. “The deal was settled on political terms, with the substantive relief in the consent decree having nothing to do with the antitrust concerns first raised in the antitrust division’s legal challenge… That could be symptomatic of a lot going on behind the scenes, behind the curtain, that we are just not aware of.”
He added that after Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners at the FTC in March, any transparency into the agency’s actions will be difficult to come by.
The FTC recently came to an “historic” $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon, ending a case brought under Biden that alleged the online retail giant tricked millions into signing up for Prime membership and then made it difficult to unsubscribe.
“The evidence showed that Amazon used sophisticated subscription traps designed to manipulate consumers into enrolling in Prime, and then made it exceedingly hard for consumers to end their subscription,” FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson said in a press release about the settlement. “Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans’ pockets, and making sure Amazon never does this again.”
While the settlement was approved by the now all-Republican commission in a 3-0 vote, one of the fired Democratic commissioners lambasted the deal as an unmitigated victory for the company.
“The FTC was *winning*—the judge was agreeing with the FTC... and the FTC was about to start a trial where they would likely get *more* leverage and could air out the full allegations and evidence against Amazon in public… And then, today, the new FTC leadership announced a settlement,” former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya posted on social media. “We have to ask ourselves: What pressure did the White House put on this FTC to enter into this settlement? What communications were there? This doesn't smell right.”
Politicized enforcement
The fear that politicization and backroom deals may overshadow antitrust principles recently led hundreds of industry-advocacy organizations, private businesses, and even conservative think tanks to press Trump to stay on the antitrust path.
“We urge you to build on the foundation already established and to resist pressures that would return federal antitrust enforcement to a more hands-off approach, the very approach that allowed unchecked market power to take root,” a letter signed by a coalition of more than 600 organizations sent on Monday said. “We encourage you to stand with those committed to implementing the bold vision you’ve articulated when you announced your Administration’s antitrust enforcers.”
Baer said the concern goes beyond companies willing to play ball getting a good deal, but also how the Trump administration could weaponize their regulatory power to go after opponents.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media giant’s advertisers started to flee the platform due to the rise of Nazi propaganda. Some of these boycotts were organized by advertising industry groups and media watchdogs.
During the Biden administration, Musk sued the media watchdogs and industry groups. But after the election, Trump’s FTC got involved.
In June, the agency approved the merger of advertising agencies Omnicom and Interpublic, as long as they don’t bar ads from platforms based on political messaging. In July, the agency launched an investigation into left-leaning Media Matters for America for alleged “unfair and deceptive practices.”
Kovacic said that antitrust enforcement during the Trump administration will have the indelible mark of politicized enforcement regardless of the reality for each individual case. But ultimately—at least for big tech—not much might change due to Trump’s noted antipathy towards them.
“For the companies [Trump] has identified as being the enemies, it’s hard to imagine what they have to offer—other than absolute capitulation—that would please him,” Kovacic said. “But for everybody else, where he doesn’t care as much, arguably, that’s much more up for negotiation.”
