Welcome to the era of anarchic antitrust

“It’s no secret,” Robert Ritchie told senators, “this industry is full of greedy snakes and scoundrels.” In January Mr Ritchie, better known by his stage name, Kid Rock, told a congressional committee that Live Nation should probably be broken up. Behind the scenes the company, which owns Ticketmaster, America’s dominant ticketing system, was contending with another God-fearing, 50-something from the populist right. Her name: Gail Slater.

In March last year Ms Slater took the helm of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), one of two top positions tasked with policing competition in American markets. (The other is chairing the Federal Trade Commission.) After getting the job Ms Slater talked about antitrust as a scalpel, apt to remove “the cancer of collusion and monopoly”. Bosses preferred the image to the sickle wielded by her predecessors under Joe Biden, but still worried she would block their deals. Ms Slater, after all, had advised J.D. Vance on economic policy before high office dulled his anti-capitalist instincts.

In the event, dealmakers need not have worried. By the autumn Ms Slater’s authority at the DOJ had been diminished as the free-market faction of the MAGA movement gained the whip-hand over the populist one that is more worried about corporate power. Her top advisers were fired. On February 12th, after months of speculation over her future, Ms Slater resigned. Shares in Live Nation jumped—a bet that her replacement will be more willing to settle an antitrust case against the firm before it goes to trial in March. The rest of corporate America is busily shaking hands in one of its biggest ever merger waves.

After Ms Slater’s exit, many rushed to pronounce the end of the “populist antitrust” movement she and, to a greater degree, her Biden-era predecessors represented. One challenge for the movement’s obituarists is working out what it was about in the first place. Populists criticise their predecessors from the “Chicago School” for focusing too narrowly on economic efficiency: the mantra that deals which increase consumer welfare are always good, they say, is a paltry response to concerns about excessive corporate power. Yet the movement’s efforts to construct its own framework for measuring or judging that power have been unsuccessful. “Big is bad” is a workable slogan for politicians and protesters, but an impossible one to build predictable rules around.

Populist antitrust may be gone. But those hoping for a return to an orderly, technocratic and generally permissive regime should not kid themselves. A new era of competition enforcement has arrived in America. Call it anarchic antitrust.

Its locus is the White House. Donald Trump has liberally marshalled America’s antitrust apparatus to pursue a number of his policies. At the president’s direction the DOJ and FTC are investigating everything from the price of meat to companies’ diversity policies. In December Mr Trump signed an order urging an investigation into ISS and Glass Lewis, the proxy advisers which are both a duopoly and ESG-mad. House-builders are thought to be next. He has even weighed in on the country’s biggest takeover saga, opining in December that the purchase of Warner Bros Discovery, a media giant, by Netflix, the world’s biggest streamer, “could be a problem”.

Well-connected lobbyists are more powerful than ever. In 2025 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), a maker of IT gear, bought Juniper, a rival, for $14bn. Ostensibly, national-security arguments trumped the antitrust ones made by Ms Slater’s department: letting the pair merge would allow them to better compete with China’s Huawei abroad, ran the logic. But Roger Alford, Ms Slater’s deputy, who was fired weeks after the deal closed, later said its approval reflected the “rule of lobbyists”. Another merger whose approval raised eyebrows was the purchase of Anywhere Real Estate, America’s second-biggest property broker, by Compass, its biggest. In both cases the buyers reportedly sought counsel from Mike Davis, an influential MAGA adviser. Live Nation has also consulted him (though a person close to the firm says he plays no role negotiating with the DOJ). After Ms Slater resigned, Mr Davis responded in a social-media post on X: “Good riddance”.

At the same time, states have been building their own antitrust regimes to replace what they see as soft-touch federal oversight, adding to the chaos. Last year Washington and Colorado became the first states to require firms to notify them before consummating a deal. Events leading up to the approval of the HPE deal are being scrutinised as part of a lawsuit involving a group of state attorneys-general who were unhappy with the perceived influence of lobbyists. Even if Live Nation settles its case with the government, some states are reportedly planning to continue the fight.

A system where authority over the world’s most important companies is divided between groups of MAGA insiders and a patchwork of local attorneys-general is certain to prove an arbitrary and costly mess. But a less obvious consequence of the revolution under way in American antitrust is that it puts the country on a collision course with its allies.

The idea that Britain might hold up a deal between two big American firms, as it did in 2023 before Microsoft eventually acquired Activision Blizzard, is implausible today. But the European Union might. In 2001 it killed the merger of General Electric and Honeywell, two American manufacturing giants. A rerun of that episode feels inevitable as American firms strike increasingly big deals and its trustbusting system becomes less predictable. Might the sale of Warner Bros inspire such a scrap? That would be an antitrust blockbuster worth watching. ■