Trump Isn’t Even Pretending He Would Fight Corporate Power

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump cast himself as a populist taking on the political and corporate establishment. His criticism of corporate mergers and his promises to protect consumers from monopolies were central to his anti-establishment message. Amazon, he said, had “a huge antitrust problem.” Pharmaceutical companies charging inflated prices for prescription drugs were “getting away with murder.” AT&T’s plans to acquire Time Warner, Inc. would put “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he told a rapturous crowd in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and vowed a Trump administration would block the deal.

Once Trump took office, the Department of Justice sued to block the Time Warner-AT&T merger, as he had pledged. Though it lost that case, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division launched major suits against Facebook, demanding the divestiture of its WhatsApp private messaging service and Instagram photo-sharing application, and against Google over its monopoly of the search engine market. (Facebook is now traded as Meta and has a $1.44 trillion market capitalization as of October 2024.) The DOJ, under Joe Biden’s administration, which continued the suit, prevailed against Google in federal district court in August.

However, the antimonopoly Trump of 2016 is nowhere to be found in 2024. Instead, this year, the former president has been courting plutocrats by offering political favors for support more brazenly than any presidential candidate in U.S. history.

For example, in February, after his supporters began boycotting Budweiser, a product line from AB InBev, the American-Belgian-Brazilian beverage and brewing giant, because it hired a transgender influencer for a branded content partnership, Trump urged them on Truth Social to give the brand a “second chance.” His post came days before a lobbyist for the beermaker’s parent company, which has a market cap of over $100 billion, was scheduled to host a campaign fundraiser.

Then, in March, despite having tried to ban the social media service TikTok via executive order in 2020, Trump reversed his position on the ubiquitous app after meeting with billionaire GOP mega-donor and former “Never Trumper” Jeff Yass, a significant shareholder in the company. Yass subsequently poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-Trump super PACs.

In a filmed meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in April, Trump offered a group of 20 oil and gas executives and lobbyists a blunt quid pro quo: If they raised $1 billion for his campaign, he would, if returned to office, slash regulations and taxes. And in another display of newfound largesse toward special interests, the septuagenarian Republican, who had once said that the cryptocurrency Bitcoin “seemed like a scam,” addressed crypto’s largest convention and promised to make America “the crypto capital of the planet.” The switch precipitated a vast influx of campaign donations to pro-Trump campaign vehicles.

Trump has softened his touch with the tech giants he once vowed to make heel. During a televised interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, he dodged a question about breaking up Google (Market Cap: $2.1 trillion). A few days later, the Republican nominee bragged on a podcast that if he recaptured the presidency, he would help Apple’s Chief Executive Officer, Tim Cook, battle a fine from the European Union. For the record, Apple’s market capitalization is the largest in the world, $3.46 trillion as of October 2024, larger than the gross national product of India or the United Kingdom.

Then there’s Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk, the mogul and South African native, who has become the politician’s wingman in the 2024 race, often appearing by the candidate’s side. In the election’s final weeks, the world’s wealthiest man has devoted unequaled resources and attention to electing Trump. Musk has effectively taken over a significant portion of Trump’s ground operations, spending $118 million on a new super PAC that’s running get-out-the-vote campaigns in several swing states—an effort Musk is personally leading from his temporary perch in pivotal Pennsylvania. Musk has become a headliner at Trump rallies, including last week’s perfervid gathering at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The CEO of Tesla and Space X has transformed the social media company X (formerly known as Twitter) into a promotional platform for Trump’s campaign, flooding the site and the accounts of its 600 million active users with right-wing content and, at the behest of campaign officials, deactivating a journalist’s account after he published leaks about Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.

Musk’s reasons for supporting Trump would seem straightforward: His companies, both publicly traded and privately held by him, have nearly 100 federal contracts worth billions of dollars. Many are the subject of federal investigations and inquiries. Donations to Trump are an investment that could buy Musk a friendly legal environment—and maybe even direct influence over the federal government’s intimate relationship with his business empire.

The once-populist Trump has promised Musk a role in his administration as the head of a “government efficiency” department that would audit the federal government for waste. (The move would invite “conflicts of interest on a scale unseen in recent memory,” as the Times put it.) Musk has said the federal budget could be cut by a third, enough to eliminate non-defense discretionary spending from the FBI to NASA. He has not been shy about how he would use such a position. “There should be a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles,” Musk said on a Tesla earnings call in October. “If there’s a Department of Government Efficiency, I’ll try to help make that happen.” Trump, for his part, has been similarly candid about the transactional nature of their alliance. As president, he opposed electric vehicles; no longer. “I’m for electric cars—I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump confessed in August.

These overtures to corporate elites are working: In recent months, a wave of endorsements and donations from billionaires and executives—many of whom had vocally opposed Trump in the past—has helped him narrow Harris’s lead.

Along the way, Trump has stopped talking about antitrust and criticizing corporations. This shameless reversal on monopoly seems less abrupt, however, if you understand how he governed as president. Despite a few high-profile cases, Trump used antitrust enforcement as a tool to help his friends and punish his enemies throughout his presidency.

This pattern emerged in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. As an investigation in The New Yorker found, Trump ordered the lawsuit against AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in November 2017 as retaliation against CNN, then owned by the media giant, for its critical coverage of him. (When the Justice Department later lost in court, it declined to appeal.) Less than a month later, when Disney announced it had reached a deal to buy 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, Trump’s DOJ conspicuously declined to intervene. Not incidentally, the deal was wildly lucrative for Fox News CEO and Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who had dedicated the full force of his media empire to getting Trump elected. Trump offered Murdoch his congratulations.

Similarly, in the summer of 2019, Trump’s antitrust enforcers not only chose not to take action against a proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile but worked to ensure the deal went through—a favor to Masayoshi Son, a Trump ally and the chairman of SoftBank, the majority owner of Sprint. By contrast, that fall, Trump’s DOJ opened a baseless antitrust investigation into four carmakers over a perceived slight. The New York Times editorial board called it a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement.”

The Trump administration’s handful of well-publicized lawsuits belied a largely passive period of antitrust enforcement. Trump’s antimonopoly enforcers at the DOJ and regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission, let massive mergers in health care, defense, agricultural chemicals, and industrial gasses sail through unchallenged. The number of major antitrust cases regulators brought to trial was lower than the four years before Trump took office. The administration eliminated the independent office tasked with protecting farmers and ranchers from meat-packing monopolies and let Facebook off with a paltry settlement for illegally allowing the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest user data. Consolidation across the economy worsened.

In truth, the antitrust revolution came to Washington after Trump left office. When Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he put antitrust at the center of federal economic policy for the first time in 40 years.

Biden’s enforcers brought ambitious lawsuits against monopolists, including Amazon, Nvidia, Ticketmaster, Apple, Google, and Facebook. In addition to the ruling against Google in August, a landmark antitrust victory, regulators have notched major wins against airline, book publishing, food production, and ad tech industry monopolies. Under the specter of robust enforcement, merger activity fell to record lows in 2022 and 2023. The administration has also empowered over a dozen other government agencies to step up regulatory enforcement, resulting in a crackdown on price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees.

Unlike Trump’s administration, Biden’s has prosecuted monopolists without fear or favor, even at risk to Democratic campaign coffers. Big Tech long maintained a cozy relationship with the party; Google’s close ties with Barack Obama’s administration did not go unnoticed in 2012 when the Justice Department declined his FTC’s recommendation to file antitrust charges against the company. A decade later, Biden chose to allow antitrust charges against Google and showed none of the regulatory favoritism endemic to the Trump administration.

In a second term, Trump’s selectivity would be manifest in more dangerous forms. Trump has trumpeted that he will seek to govern like Vladimir Putin in Russia or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who dispense favors and threaten enemies to keep them in line. That would only change if Trump died or became incapacitated or if Vance, who’s shown a more serious commitment to antimonopoly policy in the Senate, takes office and breaks with Trump’s approach.

Meanwhile, some progressives have questioned whether Kamala Harris will follow Biden’s path. Harris’s brother-in-law and adviser, Tony West, is on leave from his role as Uber’s chief legal officer, and her debate prep adviser, Karen Dunn, is representing Google in the more recent of the FTC’s two antitrust cases against the tech giant. But the evidence suggests that Harris will advance Biden’s competition agenda, not hinder it. She’s received support from some billionaire tech moguls but, unlike Trump, hasn’t publicly promised them any policy changes, such as firing Lina Khan, Biden’s dogged FTC chair, something Democratic donors like IAC Chair Barry Diller and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have demanded. She inherited Biden’s campaign operation, and several key veterans of Biden’s National Economic Council, which helped shape his antitrust agenda, are now top advisors to the Harris campaign, suggesting continuity in policymaking.

Harris’s written economic platform is essentially the same as her predecessor’s, and her record as California’s attorney general suggests that she’s willing to take corporate interests to court. On the campaign trail, Harris has touted protecting consumers and making markets more competitive. “On day one, I will take on price-gouging and bring down costs,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta. “We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits. We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases. And we will take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans.” The proposed crackdown on corporate price gouging—the single most popular economic proposal from either candidate, according to a Guardian poll—is the subject of a new ad campaign.

While we can’t know what Harris will do in office if she wins, her closing pitch is clear: she will persist in restoring the federal government’s role as a check on corporate power. Her opponent has long since stopped pretending he’d do the same.

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