Democrats and Trump-critical Republicans are equally eager to expose the president as a fake populist whose only true allegiance is to the wealthy and powerful. But they couldn’t be more wrong.
When Justice Department antitrust czar Gail Slater resigned last month, both groups saw another opportunity to push that false narrative.
Slater became a rising star in the new administration by articulating and pursuing an “America First Antitrust” agenda that broke from the pro-corporate approach of her GOP-appointed predecessors.
Her departure after repeated clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi led observers from both sides of the aisle to conclude that “corporate influence” was “corroding the populist antitrust movement,” Politico reported.
MAGA influencer Laura Loomer lamented that “Big Tech is winning.” Former Biden DOJ official Reed Showalter proclaimed “the end of … populist antitrust in the Trump administration.”
As it turns out, however, reports of America First Antitrust’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Omeed Assefi, who replaced Slater on an acting basis, began his late March remarks at George Washington Law School by directly quoting his former boss’s vision of an antitrust agenda that “empowers America’s forgotten men and women to shape their own economic destinies in the free market.”
The rest of Assefi’s speech revealed just how committed he remains to that agenda.
If Slater’s resignation marked a major shift in the administration’s antitrust enforcement strategy, you’d expect Assefi to downplay Slater’s victories.
Instead, he highlighted her settlement with Live Nation, which secured “the first antitrust divestitures in a monopolization case in recent years” by forcing the company to sell off some of its amphitheaters. Assefi also made it clear that DOJ’s antitrust division scored this win “[d]espite the attempts of those who try to make structural relief impossible” — an apparent dig at proponents of an antitrust philosophy he deems too deferential to corporate interests.
He even boasted about “[f]ighting for lower costs and more choices” by targeting a price-gouging hospital system in the first civil antitrust case filed under the new administration and promised that “several” other cases are “in the pipeline.”
And as he played up the administration’s commitment to tough enforcement, Assefi also reiterated Slater’s commitment to “getting out of the way of law-abiding businesses.”
America First Antitrust is not about enforcement for optics’ sake or punishing companies for success. That’s what the Biden DOJ did time and time again.
Take the Biden Justice Department’s bogus lawsuit against Visa.
“Immediately before the inauguration, the DOJ asked the extremely partisan Southern District of New York — which is where Team Biden filed the case — to show no mercy to the company,” read a Breitbart News report. “The administration tried to pin some of the blame for its inflation onto the company’s merchant debit card fees, which, according to Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Finance Lulu Wang, amount to just 44 cents for the average $60 Visa debit card transaction."
Laughable, right? The story went on to cite how critics argue “the DOJ’s case was less about facts than about finding a scapegoat for inflation.”
Isn't that the truth? But this was par for the course for the Biden DOJ, which never had a problem scapegoating faceless companies for its inflationary agenda and other public policy crises.
That’s the difference between the Biden and Trump DOJs. One administration used antitrust as a political weapon to shift blame. The other is using it as a scalpel — targeting real abuses while leaving legitimate business conduct alone. And Assefi made clear which approach is now in charge.
This speech leaves no room for doubt: Slater may have been forced out of DOJ, but her antitrust philosophy certainly wasn’t.
Assefi is not minimizing, apologizing for, or rolling back the principles and achievements of populist antitrust enforcement. He’s actively celebrating them and continuing to apply them.
Ashley Clapper Bennett, J.D. is an attorney with Corbin, Stapler & Clapper, PC. She is a member of the Central Texas Republican Women and Texas Federation of Republican Women and a former candidate for the 146th Judicial District Court.