Pluralistic: Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup (29 Jul 2025)


Today's links


An altered version of a Gilded Age editorial cartoon titled 'Who controls the Senate?' which depicts the Senate as populated by tiny, ineffectual politicians ringed by massive, bloated, brooding monopolists. A door labeled 'people's entrance.' is firmly locked. A sign reads, 'This is a senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists and for the monopolists.' The image has been altered: an editorial cartoon of Boss Tweed, portrayed as a portly man in a business suit with a money-bag for a head, stands in the foreground. He is wearing a MAGA hat. On his shoulder perches a tiny, 'big stick' swinging FDR from another editorial cartoon. The logos of the monopolists in the background have been replaced with logos for Chevron, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, WB, PGA, Apple, Comcast, Realpage and KKR.

Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup (permalink)

Trump conquered America by pulling together a coalition of groups that broadly hate the same things, but who differ sharply in what things they aspire to. This approach creates a broad and therefore powerful coalition, but it's also a brittle one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely eat shit. Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

For Trump, the only point of this coalition is to help him amass wealth and power, and so he has established himself as the ultimate arbiter of its conflicts. If you're the leader of a warring MAGA faction, your top winning move is to figure out how getting your way can personally benefit Trump.

Which is why the Epstein scandal has knocked Trump so badly off balance: his coalition partners are unwilling to accept the idea that Epstein's death is a nothingburger, that the Epstein files are a hoax, that Ghislaine Maxwell is the victim of Democratic cabal lawfare. They're insisting that Trump go public with all the messy details of Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, even though Trump has made it abundantly clear that this would be personally disadvantageous to him, likely because of evidence that he sexually assaulted Epstein's underage victims.

As Trump flails about in a bid to prevent an Epstein-driven MAGA crackup, more cracks are appearing. One of these runs straight through the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, which became a generationally important powerhouse under Biden, intervening to prevent monopoly formation and to break up existing monopolies in a way not seen since the 1960s.

There's a strong antitrust wing in the MAGA coalition, the so-called "right populists," many of whom associated themselves with Biden's brilliant FTC chair, Lina Khan, dubbing themselves "Khan-servatives." For Trump – who never met a predatory corporate monster he didn't love – these MAGA trustbusters are useful idiots, because they let him practice "boss-politics antitrust":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

You see, every major corporation in the US is a flagrant violator of antitrust law (thanks to decades of comatose antitrust enforcers). What's more, every major corporation in the US is hoping to violate more antitrust laws, primarily through illegal, anticompetitive mergers. For Trump, this presents a golden opportunity: given that there are so many guilty companies out there in the world, he can selectively prosecute the ones that he wants to make an example of and/or extract tribute from.

This is what happened with the Colbert cancellation: Paramount wanted permission to complete a obviously illegal, anticompetitive merger with Skydance. Trump launched a bullshit suit against Paramount for not being sufficiently mean to Kamala Harris during the election. Paramount settled this suit – which Trump had a 0% chance of winning – for $16m, which is to say, they gave Trump a $16m bribe under the flimsiest of pretexts. Then, when Colbert made fun of them for doing this and Trump squawked, Paramount fired Colbert and cancelled his show. Finally, the merger was approved, on condition that Trump be allowed to place a political minder within CBS's news organization who would prevent them from publishing statements that Trump disliked in either his personal or governmental capacity. This is as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as the Paramount suit was, but if Paramount goes along with it, who's got standing to challenge the deal?

That's where this all gets interesting: Donald Trump isn't the first president to hit on this strategy. Richard Nixon (AKA Trump beta 0.9) ordered his Justice Department to walk away from a case blocking one of International Telephone and Telegraph's illegal mergers because ITT had donated $400,000 to the RNC (yes, this is small ball compared to Donald Trump's scams, but again, Nixon was just the beta test).

This enraged Congress (remember when Congress used to get enraged?) that Sen John Tunney introduced legislation that gives broad swathes of the public standing to challenge the DOJ when they appear to take bribes in exchange for favorable antitrust rulings. Under the Tunney Act, merger settlements that are "against the public interest" can be halted by a federal judge.

Which brings me back to the MAGA coalition crackup. Last week, there was an attempted coup in the DOJ's Antitrust Division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-attempted-coup-at-the-antitrust

At issue was one of those "Kahnservative" antitrust enforcements. Right after the Trump inauguration, HPE and Juniper Networks, two of the biggest enterprise WLAN companies, announced a $14b merger, which was immediately opposed by Trump's new DOJ antitrust enforcers. Trustbusters took this as a sign that Trump was going to let his "right populist" wing hold the whip-hand over corporatist parts of his coalition.

But by June, the DOJ moved to settle the case, dropping the announcement after close-of-business on a Friday, which is as close as the government is legally allowed to come to simply not mentioning it at all. The merger would proceed with the most pro-forma, nonsensical, weaksauce conditions. HPE's shares shot up by 11% and some insider trader made a killing exercising a gazillion HPE call options just before the announcement dropped:

https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1939750029230494049

One of Trump's mouthiest coalition members, the MAGA influencer Mike Davis, had been a vocal opponent of the merger, but after it sailed through, we learned that he'd gotten a seven-figure job with HPE to serve as their fixer with the Trump administration:

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/top-trump-administration-antitrust-official-faces-criticism-over-approach-sources-say/

AG Pam Bondi's Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle overruled the DOJ's antitrust boss, Gail Slater (a former JD Vance staffer) and accepted the bullshit HPE deal. Various Trumpies spoke out against it, like Laura Loomer, who posted an outraged jeremiad against the merger deal, then deleted it (Loomer claimed that Mizelle had waded into the deal in order to help his wife, Judge Kathryn Mizelle, secure a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals):

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1949995374606745741

Now, two of Gail Slater's top aides – Roger Alford and Bill Rinner – have been fired:

https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1949963841455956084

As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, this is a disturbing precedent, given all the antitrust cases currently being fought by the DoJ, involving Apple, Google, Visa, Livenation, Realpage, etc:

https://prospect.org/power/2025-07-29-law-could-blow-open-trump-antitrust-corruption/

But, Dayen says, the Tunney Act means that every one of these deals could be an opening for a Tunney Act challenge, which would include "communications between agents of the companies and employees of the United States." It would force the judges in the case to determine "whether lobbying concerns took precedence over the public interest." And the judge who's overseeing the HPE/Juniper deal is a Biden appointee, Casey Pitts, who worked for a firm specializing in labor, environmental and civil rights cases.

So this is an opportunity to demonstrate that Trump's DOJ is a pay-for-play shop, something that will help the "right populist" side of the MAGA coalition whip up their supporters against the corporatist wing. This is a pretty good gambit, especially given how much parts of the MAGA coalition hate Big Tech:

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/big-tech-trump-antitrust-lawsuits/

This isn't anywhere near as big as the Epstein scandal, but nevertheless, it's a situation in which Trump's own self-interest can only be served by doing something that his most vocal and easily enraged base hate. It's another fracture line in the coalition that a smart opposition (yeah, I know) could hammer on.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Hearing aids re-imagined: “hearware” https://web.archive.org/web/20050731005957/http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/hear_wear/

#20yrsago Ten thousand superballs rolling down a San Francisco hill-street https://www.flickr.com/photos/49503155830@N01/28841983/

#20yrsago Michael Lynn’s censored Cisco security presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20050810081315/https://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68356,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

#10yrsago Phil Gramm: “exploited worker” AT&T CEO “only” got $75m https://web.archive.org/web/20150809054245/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/29/former-gop-sen-phil-gramm-outrage-att-ceo-got/

#10yrsago Self-aiming sniper rifle can be pwned over the Internet https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/

#5yrsago Where "software" comes from https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#word-nerd

#5yrsago Bitcoin is not a socialist's ally https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#bitcoinism

#5yrsago The Internet Archive defends online libraries https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#cdl

#5yrsago No consequences for police violence at BLM actions https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#impunity

#5yrsago Let's force Big Tech to interoperate https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#beyond-breakups

#5yrsago Unauthorized Meat https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#mellow-brown

#5yrsago Break 'Em Up https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

#1yrago A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1013 words yesterday, 14308 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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