An article in The Wall Street Journal recently confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Donald Trump is changing how the federal regulatory state works.
Whereas decisions over matters like business mergers were once left up to regulatory agencies, Trump has now gotten personally involved. He’s done everything from fire government antitrust commissioners to decide on whether pending mergers should be greenlighted.
Cue the hand-wringing in Washington. Trump is interfering with the bureaucracy! He’s
Never mind that the president, unlike any regulator, is democratically elected. Trump alone has the authority to set executive branch policy, and that’s
But there’s another reason we should cheer Trump taking regulatory matters into his own hands: he’s doing it in the public interest. Trump is using antitrust to make Americans’ lives better.
Imagine that!
Take the recently proposed merger between Hollywood giant Warner Bros. Discovery and content mega-streamer Netflix. The deal would have created the largest media corporation on earth and consolidated massive market power inside Netflix, already the world’s biggest streaming service.
Trump rightly sensed that such a company would have been too big, leading to less competition, higher prices, and more warm-milk Hollywood
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This plus some behind-the-scenes pressure
Netflix might have lost, but middle America won. And we’re supposed to think this is presidential corruption?
Another reason Trump has intervened in antitrust policy is the legacy of his predecessor. Under Joe Biden, government regulators acted more like czars, abandoning the traditional antitrust standard of consumer welfare in favor of going after businesses for little reason at all.
Sometimes this proved disastrous. When Spirit Airlines tried to merge with JetBlue back in 2022, it seemed like a win-win—it would have saved the struggling Spirit while creating a new globally scaled budget airline. Yet Biden’s regulators sued, claiming the merger would lead to less competition and higher prices.
Team Biden ultimately won, and the result was that, last month, Spirit shut its doors for good. This, of course, led to less competition and higher prices while killing thousands of jobs in the airline industry.
Trump officials not only called out Biden for killing Spirit—with clear coordination from the top—but Trump himself appears to be taking a lighter touch on airline mergers generally. As airfares continue to rise, as budget airlines frantically search for capital, this is the right move.
Or take another antitrust win for the American people, the telecommunications merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks.
The Trump administration greenlit the deal after the intelligence community endorsed the merger, noting that it would be a win for U.S. national security as the new HPE-Juniper company would have the scale, talent, and resources to compete globally with Huawei, the Chinese conglomerate that regularly engages in espionage and IP theft against the United States. Trump’s critics snipe that he approved a corporate giveaway but have little to say about these national security benefits or these positive outcomes for American consumers.
Ultimately, what the Left wants is more of the Biden same, where drunk-with-
The last thing we need is an ideological approach to antitrust where left-wing zealots crusade against businesses because it makes them feel good. What Trump understands is that mergers by themselves aren’t good or bad—what matters is whether they benefit the economy and the country.
In fact, if anything, Trump should go even further. Despite his good work, several of the frivolous antitrust lawsuits from the Biden years still remain open.
The president should flex his muscles and finish the job of restoring sanity to the regulatory state. Everyone from movie fans to air travelers can be glad he did.
Mimi Walters is a former U.S. congresswoman and former member of the House Judiciary Committee.
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