Now that the dust has settled on President Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power, it is time to govern. The president has already signed hundreds of executive orders tackling issues from immigration to DEI. He is working non-stop for the American people, and he is just getting started. This truly is a new golden age for America, a period of technological advancement, prosperity, and peace.
On Nov. 5, 2024, Trump achieved the greatest comeback in political history against all odds. He did so because he and his family had a strong team of America First patriots behind them. In the years since he left office in 2020, many of these patriots faced unemployment, Big Tech censorship, lawfare, and debanking simply because they supported Trump and refused to disown him. Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon even went to jail for him. Many woke actors in corporate America played a role in canceling these patriots, and Trump knows this. He remembers how in 2020, corporate America flocked to donate millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter, knowing that it was a Marxist organization, but refused to donate to his campaign.
Today, woke corporate America is busy rebranding itself as MAGA-friendly so it can cozy up to the new Trump administration. These moves are at best cosmetic. My advice to the president, the Trump White House and broader administration following these moves? Don’t believe your lying eyes. Big Tech is not your friend. Do not put hope over experience and sell yourself short. Mark Zuckerberg may have given the Trump inaugural fund $1 million, but he spent $400 million trying to stop Trump in 2020.
So why is Big Tech cozying up to MAGA like they are on a cheap date? The answer is easy: antitrust law enforcement. What Big Tech really cares about is not Trump, or his family, or even the country. What they really fear is tough, but fair, antitrust enforcement by the Trump administration.
Today, Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Amazon, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and Apple are facing major, bipartisan antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department and FTC. Several of these cases began under the Trump 45 administration, including two cases against Google filed by the Justice Department. The Biden Justice Department won the first case, and the Trump Justice Department is poised to win the second case. Google is banking on the Trump 47 Justice Department pulling its punches on both cases. They and the other Big Tech platforms desperately want a return to the Bush-Obama Uniparty antitrust ‘enforcement,’ and they are hoping they can fool the Trump 47 administration into going there.
After all, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations enforced the antitrust laws so little that they put the ‘Big’ in Big Tech. It was the Obama administration that waved through Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, and it was the Obama White House that forced the Federal Trade Commission to close an early monopolization investigation into Google back in 2013. The Big Tech platforms used this uniparty antitrust amnesty to hyperscale and become dominant in several important online markets.
President Trump is smart enough to know a bad deal when he sees one; he literally wrote a book called ‘The Art of the Deal.’ He is also too smart to buy the argument that Big Tech monopolists must become even bigger and more dominant in order to compete with China. America will win the AI global race the American way, like it always has.
Free markets exist only when antitrust laws are enforced with vigor. Free markets require functioning markets. And when the trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple – crush competition, shutter small businesses, cancel those with whom they disagree, and carry China’s water, we no longer have functioning and free-markets. We must end Big Tech’s gatekeeping power over information and commerce.
There is clear historical precedent for this: If President Reagan had listened to AT&T in 1984, we might never have seen the competition and innovation unleashed by the Ma Bell breakup. This innovation included the wireless industry and key parts of the early internet. At the time, the tech giant argued that it needed to be a monopoly so the U.S. could compete globally with the Soviet Union. Of course, AT&T was wrong, and the Soviet Union crumbled in 1990. But if Reagan had listened to the company in 1984, not only would he have been on the wrong side of history, Americans might never have benefited from the competition and innovation brought about by antitrust law enforcement against AT&T.
President Trump’s antitrust law enforcers, led by Gail Slater at the Trump Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, will be fair and enforce the law impartially, protecting the U.S. free market from woke monopolists and standing up for American values and American consumers. They will target the anticompetitive tumors on the free market, which is the opposite of the industry-wide regulations (market-entry barriers to startup competitors) the Big Tech monopolists (like Facebook) seek.
Uniparty antitrust that favors woke corporations and Big Tech monopolists will do the opposite. Big Tech and their allies alongside the DC establishment will pull every dirty trick in the book to undermine Trump’s antitrust law enforcers, but Trump knows better. This is his time for choosing Trump antitrust over uniparty Bush-Obama antitrust. To quote Reagan, when it comes to antitrust, Trump should ‘dance with the one who brung ya.’
Mike Davis is the Founder and President of the Article III Project.
