SAME BUT DIFFERENT — Some of America’s best-known business leaders spent their holidays sucking up to President-elect Donald Trump. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. An Amazon documentary is set to chronicle Melania Trump’s move into the White House. Mark Zuckerberg named Trump supporter Dana White to Meta’s board. Their willingness to kiss the ring isn’t just about currying personal favor with the incoming president. After President Joe Biden ushered in a new era for aggressive anti-monopoly enforcement and pressed to curb the power of big business, CEOs are hoping the Trump administration might be a lot more friendly to consolidation, allowing powerful companies to merge without much oversight. But Trump’s actions thus far have suggested he’s at least somewhat pro-aggressive antitrust enforcement. In a December flurry of Truth Social posts, he nominated Andrew Ferguson, a current commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission to replace Lina Khan as chair, antitrust attorney Mark Meador to be the third Republican FTC commissioner and Gail Slater to lead the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The three are all conservatives but they represent a wing of the Trump Republican party that bucks conventional GOP thinking: They’ve criticized Big Tech not just for censoring conservative speech but also for being too big and too powerful — not so different from the left’s critique. Still, it’s an open question whether they’ll act on those concerns, especially when several major tech leaders are teed up for administration positions. “This is a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on Big Tech,” wrote Matt Stoller of Trump’s pick of Slater in a post on X. Stoller, who runs an anti-monopoly podcast and is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, added in his newsletter, “while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems [Trump] is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival.“ The three are not expected to be nearly as aggressive as Biden’s antitrust cops, Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the U.S. assistant attorney general for the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. But Biden’s anti-monopoly soldiers are hopeful Trump’s election won’t be the end of an antitrust revolution. One former Biden administration official described Meador, a former deputy chief counsel for antitrust & competition policy for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), as “a friend of the movement and really smart and aggressively enforcement minded.” Slater, a tech skeptic and policy adviser for incoming Vice President JD Vance, is not expected to drop the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuits against Ticketmaster or Apple, disappointing a business community hopeful for the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan. As for Ferguson, he has voted against much of Khan’s agenda at the FTC, but there are signs that he may advance Trump’s battle against Big Tech. Just last month, when Khan revived an obscure and long-dormant law prohibiting price discrimination in a lawsuit against Southern Glazer, the nation’s largest alcohol distributor, Ferguson voted against it. But his dissent argued not against Khan’s decision to reinvigorate enforcement but against her choice of target — a position several observers viewed as part of his campaign to earn Trump’s nomination for FTC chair. And today, the FTC brought a high-profile case against John Deere, a top tractor maker, alleging the company illegally restricted repair. Ferguson again voted against the lawsuit, but his dissent focused only on procedural issues. “I am glad the Commission is taking up the cause of the farmer, and that the Antitrust Division has recently devoted substantial resources to promoting competition in agriculture markets,” he wrote in his dissent. Of course, the left still has reservations about the scope of Trump’s anti-monopoly agenda — and his convictions. On a lot of competition issues, “Mark Meador, who is great, is not Lina Khan. Gail Slater, who is great, is not Jonathan Kanter,” said Joe Van Wye, a lobbyist for the progressive shop P Street and who previously worked on the House Judiciary Committee with Khan. Some in the Biden administration also believe that Trump could abandon Biden’s all-of-government approach which identified new or previously abandoned authorities the FTC and DOJ could use, wielded the government’s procurement contracts as a cudgel and used the bully pulpit to slow a merger wave. Instead, they think that the Trump administration will focus its enforcement efforts on one industry, Tech. “I am skeptical that an FTC and a DOJ under Trump will be as focused on merger enforcement outside of a very select handful of markets,” said an outgoing Biden administration official. “While they may mean bad news for the tech companies … I think you could see a lot of mergers in markets like energy and health care.” Given how integral blocking mergers is to an effective anti-monopoly strategy, that could mean that the Trump administration still oversees significant consolidation across the economy — and all of the negative downstream effects that might have, the official noted. Ultimately, the picks are just one more iteration of the team of rivals Trump is harnessing to run his administration. On antitrust, the divide is perhaps best characterized as an Elon Musk v. JD Vance competition. Musk despises Khan and her ilk. Vance, in contrast, has spoken alongside Khan and liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at RemedyFest 2024, a pro-enforcement antitrust conference. Vance’s influence is a big part of what led to Slater, Ferguson and Meador, Biden’s allies say. “When you have a leader of your party who is saying these things out loud, I think folks could easily fall in line behind this kind of new thinking,” said Chris Jones, a lobbyist for grocery stores who also runs the Main Street Competition Coalition, a pro-enforcement group. “There’s a clear through line in terms of what we’ve seen come out of the Biden administration, translating over to Trump. There’s a populism that both parties are taking advantage of.” Still, Trump’s tunnel focus on the tech industry demonstrates a “hollowness of the populism” on the right, said the outgoing Biden administration official, pointing to Khan’s lawsuit blocking a $25 billion grocery merger as evidence of the Biden administration’s economy-wide approach. “They’re talking a big game on Big Tech. I actually think a lot of them mean it. But what about like, a hospital merger in Indiana that’s gonna fire a bunch of nurses and raise prices and lower the costs and convenience of service? Consolidation is everywhere. It is not just in tech. And I suspect that you’re going to see who the real populists are, especially on merger enforcement.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at marciabrown@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @Marcia_Brown9.
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