Trump’s changes to pro-business breaks antitrust laws.

In the antitrust realm, the story is a bit more that Trump picked up on the anti-monopoly movement and used it for his own ends. For instance, Trump followed through on his campaign promise by bringing a merger challenge against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, though a judge ruled against him. He didn’t act on Amazon’s monopoly, but he did bring monopolization cases against Google and Facebook, the first cases against big tech in two decades. The administration also blocked Facebook’s attempted launch of its own currency Libra, and ended Amazon’s giant cloud contract with the Pentagon. Trump even promulgated rules against pharmacy benefit managers, and forced hospitals to reveal their price list publicly.

Yet, consolidation worsened, as most mergers went through unimpeded, from CVS-Aetna in health care to Disney-Fox in streaming to the Linde-Praxair industrial gas merger to the Northrop-Orbital merger that placed one corporation in charge of our nuclear arsenal. Trump Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim actually lobbied for the Sprint-T-Mobile deal, which has raised cell phone costs. Trump eliminated the antitrust agency for farmers, as seed and chemicals moved from the Big Six (Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont) to the Big Four (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta, and BASF). We’re still living with Delrahim’s legacy; the rent-fixing cartel run by RealPage exists in part because the Antitrust Division allowed that company to buy out its competition in rent management software.

Ideologically, Trump’s Antitrust Division promoted private equity, allowed Facebook to get away with a fig leaf settlement on Cambridge Analytica, supported certain no poach agreements, and filed amicus briefs on behalf of Uber’s attempt to stop drivers from organizing. He adopted the deregulatory posture of the Bush era and shut down consumer protection in finance. And Trump himself helped bring U.S. drilling firms together with OPEC to increase oil prices in 2020. Then there are the hundreds of judges he put on the bench, who are often hostile to antitrust enforcement.