Is the second Trump administration pursuing populism or tech-forward libertarianism? The preferred answer among its intelligent spokesmen and defenders is: Yes. That is, the Trumpians believe they can and must have the backing of America’s most innovative sectors — especially tech — as they attempt to rejigger the global economy to advantage the working-class Americans who twice elected Donald Trump.
Squint and you can this working out. Sort of. As with earlier Right-wing coalitions — like the one between religious conservatives and foreign-policy hawks that defined the Bush era — both camps can claim some wins. Populists got an immigration crackdown plus tariffs; the tech bros neutered entire regulatory agencies. But when it comes to combating monopoly, Big Tech’s default business plan, the contradiction threatens to make the populists look like utter saps.
Standing at the sharp edge of these tensions is a diminutive Dublin-born lawyer named Gail Slater, who leads the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice as assistant attorney general. Given her reputation as a fierce enemy of monopolies, Trump’s choice of Slater for the job drew cheers from the market-skeptical corners of the so-called New Right. Yet Slater views her mission as protecting markets — not attacking them.
“We see what we’re doing as an essential part of the American free enterprise system”, she tells me in an interview at her office deep inside the DOJ’s labyrinthine Washington headquarters last week. “We think that we should have more confidence in our system and not think that in order to compete with China, we have to become more like China” — that is, an economy in which most sectors are dominated by a handful of giants coddled and controlled by the state.
The tech lobby insists that US national security and dominance in fields like AI require government to get out of industry’s way. Slater doesn’t see it this way, and the disagreement is more than academic. This week, an antitrust suit against Google launched in the first Trump administration and carried through by Team Biden entered its remedies phase. In 2024, Google was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the online search market, and now the court has to decide how to hold it accountable and prevent future wrongdoing.
Slater’s litigation team argued that Google operates a “vicious cycle”, spending enormous sums to become the default engine worldwide, then improving its search results with better data gleaned thereby, and then using the windfall revenues to deepen its advantage as the default engine. The Trump administration insists that Google must sever its default-engine partnerships with the likes of Apple, divest from its own Chrome browser, and license its data to competitors.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission — a parallel independent agency with rule-making authority as well as the power to bring its own cases — is trying a suit against Meta launched in 2020, during the first Trump term. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg attempted to forestall the trial by offering a $1 billion settlement, far short of the $30 billion demanded by FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. Trump himself was reportedly open to a cash deal, but the FTC ultimately spurned Zuckerberg’s payout after a meeting involving Ferguson and key staff.
Was Slater worried that a cash offer, however high, wouldn’t bring about structural fixes to Meta’s overweening market power? Yes, “and I’m told I was in that meeting”, she adds knowingly — that is to say, she inveighed against settling. A progressive antitrust veteran tells me he believes that Slater’s arguments played an important role in the outcome.
In response, Big Tech and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce Right have characterised Slater as a dangerous radical who’d sacrifice American innovation on the altar of fair play. But she insists her philosophy has a solidly conservative precedent in the Reagan administration’s decision to break up AT&T.
“This is an argument that’s been made before”, she tells me. “AT&T made a similar argument when this division, the Antitrust Division, in the mid-Eighties” resolved to “break them up.” Back then, “AT&T said, ‘You can’t do this. We are a national champion. We are critical to this country’s success. We will lose the Cold War if you break up AT&T’, in so many words.” Even so, “the division moved forward, and the Reagan administration, which is not thought of as the toughest antitrust enforcer in the history of the country” divided the firm into smaller units. Bell Labs, its research and development arm, was spun off.
America didn’t lose the Cold War, and contrary to the corporate fearmongering, the following decades saw the communications revolution that allows you to read this very article. “From that [breakup] came a lot of competition and innovation”, notes Slater. “The wireless industry came from that breakup. Bell Labs was unleashed, because the innovations at Bell Labs had been suppressed for the reason that AT&T didn’t want to disrupt its own monopoly.”
“Speaking to Slater and her colleagues, it’s hard to believe they’re part of the same administration as Elon Musk.”
It’s true that bigness is sometimes rational. Most modern industries entail network effects, increasing returns to scale, or both. It’s why you don’t see mom-and-pop tire manufacturers, as UnHerd contributor Michael Lind often quips. But as the AT&T case shows, bigness can also generate sclerosis. Firms that dominate “toll roads”, whether landline connections or search engines, collect hefty rents without having to innovate or improve their products. They begin to put much of their energy into maintaining the chokehold.
As a result, market power translates into political power and vice versa in an accursed loop all too characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. It’s why Slater views antitrust as a critical component of the post-neoliberal turn in American political economy and the bipartisan rethink on globalisation.
“I came from a family of lawyers”, she recalls. “And for people of my generation in Ireland, a lot of our legal education was influenced by being part of the European Union”, and that meant “competition law and economic law. Law and economics was a big part of, you know, European Union law, because it was all about integrating those economies”.
A pinched account of antitrust law, in which the only thing that mattered was consumer prices, was critical to the neoliberal revolution. That model “did very, very well for a lot of companies and the stock market” — and for a narrow slice of the population with the right degrees and the equity portfolios to show for it. The rest lost well-paying, often-unionised jobs and were told to take solace in cheap flatscreens.
There has to be an alternative model that “has more of a care for … American citizens, right?” asks Slater. “We see ourselves as part of that project.”
From an antitrust point of view, this means taking a more wholistic view of the consumer-welfare standard that is at the heart of American monopoly law, crucially determining whether mergers should go forward. Slater laments how neoliberals of the Left and the Right, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, reduced consumer welfare to consumer prices alone, neglecting other factors, such as whether a merger would substantially lessen competition or cost jobs (consumers are also workers, after all).
Today’s antitrust renaissance — represented on the Right by Slater and Ferguson and on the Left by Biden-era czars like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter — is all about reopening windows onto the economy that had been shuttered by the neoliberals. Yet Slater resists the “Khan-servative” label embraced by Right-of-center fans of the progressive antimonopoly crusader.
“There’s some overlap, like in the Venn diagram, there is some overlap” with Khan’s approach, Slater says. But there are also significant points of departure. For one thing, Khan led the FTC, aggressively using that agency’s rulemaking authority, which had long been left dormant. Slater, by contrast, is at the Antitrust Division, strictly an enforcement agency.
Philosophically, too, Slater sees herself as perhaps more deal-friendly compared to Khan. “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign”, says Slater, “we’ll just get out of the way. There was a perception . . . that a lot of deals were being held up for a long time, unnecessarily by both agencies [the FTC and the Antitrust Division]. And that was leading to inefficiencies” and hindering “deal flow”. Slater hopes that her approach — “If your deal is not a problem, we’re gonna say, ‘OK, you’re free to merge’ ” — will lead to less polarising drama in the business community.
At the same time, she has so far retained the merger-review guidelines the Trumpians inherited from Team Biden. Though standard practice, the move has triggered grumbling in the pro-business press. It also garnered praise from a group of high-ranking progressives and Biden alumni I spoke with earlier this month. Slater is also scrutinising the use of anticompetitive practices to suppress wages — winning a criminal conviction against a home health agency to fix nurses’ wages in Las Vegas. And she beams about meeting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien as one of her earliest steps in the role.
Speaking to Slater and her colleagues — one of them vents rage about how corporate attorneys used to walk around the DOJ building as if they owned it — it’s hard to believe they’re part of the same administration as Elon Musk, who positively loathed Biden’s trust-busters. Slater says she supports DOGE’s mission, even as she has resisted its efforts to shutter her division’s local field offices.
After our interview, I email her to ask if she would hesitate to act against one of Musk’s firms if she concluded that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior. In response, she sent me a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post announcing her nomination to the job, underlining the President’s expectation that she will enforce the law “vigorously and FAIRLY.”
