The Scene
Companies and their advisors waking up to a new Washington: You can do deals again.
The ouster of Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater last week makes clear that the White House’s business-friendly approach has won out over populists like Slater, Vice President JD Vance, and MAGA adviser Steve Bannon who are more skeptical of corporate consolidation.
A year ago, deal lawyers were busy rewriting client memos to reflect the populism of the campaign trail, where candidate Trump had railed against big tech, defense, and healthcare companies “stifling competition.” That rhetoric has been replaced by a basic long-leash Republicanism — a shift that may be unsurprising with a dealmaker in the Oval Office, but has disappointed progressives and hardcore populists and sent legal sherpas scrambling to freshen their advice.
Remedies are back on the table, offering companies the chance to cut a deal — sometimes with the help of an ascendant crop of MAGA lobbyists — to get their mergers approved.
“The advice to clients that have transactions likely to face scrutiny is to come ready with something to offer,” said Tim Cornell, an antitrust lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton.
The dominant force in big tech has shifted from online censorship fights, which sharpened questions about platforms’ size and reach, to AI urgency, where the industry and the White House are more aligned. Vice President JD Vance, Slater’s former boss, has used his political capital elsewhere, staying out of deal fights between the antitrust division and higher-ups at Trump’s DOJ.
“I think we all thought Vance would be more influential,” Cornell said. Slater “was an official serving at the pleasure of the president, and apparently it’s no longer the president’s pleasure.”
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Merger investigations neared a record low in 2025, according to the delightfully named DAMITT database maintained by law firm Dechert. The Trump administration dropped a lawsuit brought by the Biden administration seeking to block a corporate-travel merger, and settled with half of 16 companies whose deals received significant scrutiny. That’s a marked shift from the Biden administration, which was skeptical of structural fixes.
“Whatever hope I had for a populist realignment on the right is slipping away,” said Lee Hepner, counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, a progressive anti-merger think tank. “You still see those voices on the right, but they are increasingly not represented in the government itself.”
For now they are relegated to group chats that lit up after Slater’s firing. “This is catastrophic,” Will Upton, a Treasury staffer during Trump’s first term and now an editor at right-wing outlet The National Pulse, moaned to a group of like-minded populists in a group chat last week, according to a screenshot shared with Semafor. “Lutnick and his goons have won out. Might as well be the admin on mergers and acquisitions.”
Liz’s view
The simplest explanation is that it was never real. Trump’s railing against Big Tech was a culture war masquerading as economic policy, and as those fights waned — partly due to the shifting personal politics of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, partly due to the undeniable resurgence of Elon Musk’s X as a free-for-all public square — so did the guise of traditional competition enforcement.
Through this lens, Slater’s downfall at DOJ was less an ideological thumping than a mundane drama of personality and personnel fights. Where the free-speech fight is still going, antitrust enforcement will continue to be a useful tool. (See: FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson’s letter to Tim Cook accusing Apple News of downranking conservative outlets.) Where it isn’t, the message is clear: the nation’s chief dealmaker wants more deals.
Room for Disagreement
There are still some trustbusters in the administration, especially at the FTC, which has avoided being pulled into messy lobbyist fights and White House schisms. “Today, massive corporate interests have an immense amount of power over multiple facets of our lives, in a way that human society hasn’t experienced before,” Trump appointee Mark Meador wrote in November in the populist American Affairs Journal. And Republican senators including Mike Lee and Tim Scott have criticized the proposed merger of Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery — without making it a fight over what’s on CNN’s air. Lee’s concerns that the deal could be a “killer non-acquisition” is a novel bit of legal theory that wouldn’t have been out of place at Lina Khan’s FTC.
Notable
- “Huge L for the populists on the right,” Matt Stoller, the progressive antimonopolist, wrote on X after Slater’s firing.
- It’s not just in the US where campaign-trail populism has failed to turn into onto-the-job trustbusting. The European Union also concluded a near-record low number of merger investigations last year, according to Dechert.