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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Remember when the American right decided that it hated (some) big businesses, specifically Big Tech? A whole branch of the Trump coalition (including JD Vance, Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley) declared themselves to be "Khanservatives," a cheering section for Biden's generationally important FTC commissioner Lina Khan:
Trump owes his power to his ability to bully and flatter a big, distrustful coalition of people who mostly hate each other into acting together, like the business lobby and the grievance-saturated conspiratorialists who hate Big Tech because they were momentarily prevented from calling for genocide or peddling election disinformation:
The best framing for the MAGA war on Big Tech comes from Trashfuture's Riley Quinn, who predicted that the whole thing could be settled by tech companies' boards agreeing to open every meeting with a solemn "stolen likes acknowledgment" that made repentance for all the shadowbanned culture warriors whose clout had been poached by soy content moderators.
And that's basically what happened. Trump's antitrust agencies practiced "boss politics antitrust" in which favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law, while Trump's enemies were threatened with punitive antitrust investigations until they fell into line:
Trump's antitrust boss Gail Slater talked a big game about "Trump Antitrust" but was thwarted at every turn by giant corporations who figured out that if they gave a million bucks to a MAGA podcaster, they could go over Slater's head and kill her enforcement actions. When Slater's deputy, Roger Alford, went public to denounce the sleazy backroom dealings that led to the approval of the HPE/Juniper merger, he was forced out of the agency altogether and replaced with a Pam Bondi loyalist who served as a kind of politburo political officer in Slater's agency:
Bondi made no secret of her contempt for Slater, and frequently humiliated her in public. Now it seems that Bondi has gotten tired of this game and has forced Slater out altogether. As ever, Matt Stoller has the best analysis of how this happened and what it means:
Stoller's main thesis is that the "conservative populist" movement only gained relevance by complaining about "censorship of conservatives" on the Big Tech platforms. While it's true that the platforms constitute an existential risk to free expression thanks to their chokehold over speech forums, it was always categorically untrue that conservatives were singled out by tech moderators:
Conservative populists' grievance-based politics is in contrast with the progressive wing of the anti-monopoly movement, which was concerned with the idea of concentrated power itself, and sought to dismantle and neuter the power of the business lobby and the billionaires who ran it:
The problem with conservative populism, then, is that its movement was propelled by the idea that Big Tech was soy and cucked and mean to conservatives. That meant that Big Tech bosses had an easy path out of its crosshairs: climb into the tank for MAGA.
That's just what they did: Musk bought Twitter; Zuck ordered his content moderators to censor the left and push MAGA influencers; Bezos neutered his newspaper in the run up to the 2024 elections; Tim Cook hand-assembled a gold participation trophy for Trump live on camera. These CEOs paid a million dollars each for seats on Trump's inauguration dais and their companies donated millions for Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
Slater's political assassination merely formalizes something that's been obvious for a year now: you can rip off the American people with impunity so long as you flatter and bribe Trump.
The HP/Juniper merger means that one company now supplies the majority of commercial-grade wifi routers, meaning that one company now controls all the public, commercial, and institutional internet you'll ever connect to. The merger was worth $14b, and Trump's trustbusters promised to kill it. So the companies paid MAGA influencer Mike Davis (who had publicly opposed the merger) a million bucks and he got Trump to overrule his own enforcers. Getting your $14b merger approved by slipping a podcaster a million bucks is a hell of a bargain.
HP/Juniper were first, but they weren't the last. There was the Discover/Capital One merger, which rolled up the two credit cards that low-waged people rely on the most, freeing the new company up for even more predatory practices, price-gouging, junk-fees, and strong-arm collections. When the bill collectors are at your door looking for thousands you owe from junk fees, remember that it was Gail Slater's weakness that sent them there:
Slater also waved through the rollup of a string of nursing homes by one of the world's most notoriously greedy and cruel private equity firms, KKR. When your grandma dies of dehydration in a dirty diaper, thank Gail Slater:
Slater approved the merger of Unitedhealth – a company notorious for overbilling the government while underdelivering to patients – with Amedisys, who provide hospice care and home health help:
The hits keep coming. Want to know why your next vacation was so expensive? Thank Slater for greenlighting the merger of American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings, which Slater challenged but then dropped, reportedly because MAGA influencer Mike Davis told her to.
Davis also got Slater to reverse her opposition to the Compass/Anywhere Real Estate merger, which will make America's dysfunctional housing market even worse:
It's not just homebuyers whose lives are worse off because of Slater's failures, it's tenants, too. Slater settled the DoJ's case against Realpage, a price-fixing platform for landlords that is one of the most culpable villains in the affordability crisis. Realpage was facing an existential battle with the DoJ; instead, they got away with a wrist-slap and (crucially) are allowed to continue to make billions helping landlords rig the rental market against tenants.
So Slater's defenestration is really just a way of formalizing Trump's approach to antitrust: threaten and prosecute companies that don't bend the knee to the president, personally…and allow companies to rob the American people with impunity if they agree to kick up a percentage to the Oval Office.
But while Slater will barely rate a footnote in the history of the Trump administration, the precipitating event for her political execution is itself very interesting. Back in September, Trump posed with Kid Rock and announced that he was going after Ticketmaster/Live Nation, a combine with a long, exhaustively documented history of ripping off and defrauding every entertainer, fan and venue in America:
At the time, it was clear that Trump had been prodded into action by two factors: the incredible success of the Mamdani campaign's focus on "affordability" (Ticketmaster's above-inflation price hikes are one of the most visible symptoms of the affordability crisis) and Kid Rock's personal grievances about Ticketmaster.
Kid Rock is the biggest-name entertainer in the Trump coalition, the guy Trump got to headline a MAGA halftime show that notably failed to dim Bad Bunny's star by a single milliwatt. Trump – a failed Broadway producer – is also notoriously susceptible to random pronouncements by celebrities (hence the Fox and Friends-to-Trump policy pipeline), so it's natural that Kid Rock's grousing got action after decades of documented abuses went nowhere.
Ticketmaster could have solved the problem by offering to exempt Trump-loyal entertainers from its predatory practices. They could have announced a touring Trumpapalooza festival headlined by Kid Rock, Christian rock acts, and AI-generated country singers, free from all junk fees. Instead, they got Gail Slater fired.
Mike Davis doesn't just represent HPE/Juniper, Amex travel, and Compass/Anywhere – he's also the fixer that Ticketmaster hired to get off the hook with the DoJ. He's boasting about getting Slater fired:
What's interesting about all this is that there were elements of the Biden coalition that also hated antitrust (think of all the Biden billionaires who called for Lina Khan to be fired while serving as "proxies" for Kamala Harris). And yet, Biden's trustbusters did more in four short years than their predecessors managed over the preceding forty.
Stoller's theory is that the progressive anti-monopoly movement (the "Brandeisians") were able to best their coalitional rivals because they did the hard work of winning support for the idea of shattering corporate power itself – not just arguing that corporate power was bad when it was used against them.
This was a slower, harder road than dividing up the world into good monopolies and bad ones, but it paid off. Today the Brandeisians who made their bones under Biden are serving the like of Mamdani:
They lit a fire that burns still. Who knows, maybe someday it'll even help Kid Rock scorch the Ticketmaster ticks that are draining his blood from a thousand tiny wounds. He probably won't have the good manners to say thank you.
🎫 Robert Smith from The Cure tweeted about ticket prices and Ticketmaster's extra fees. He also tweeted about the verified fan process. 14/15 March 2023 x
