With 3-0 GOP Majority And All Democrats Fired, The FTC Is Now A Total Trump Puppet Agency Pretending To Care About ‘Antitrust Reform’

Back in March Trump illegally fired the Federal Trade Commission's two Democratic Commissioners. With a captured Supreme Court and a 3-2 agency majority, Trumpism could have already done whatever it wanted at the FTC, so firing the two Democratic Commissioners was just scorched Earth; like applying napalm on the site of a nuclear strike. Real sociopath shit.

With everything going on, the firings were about a four hour news cycle. But the two fired Commissioners (Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya) sued Trump, noting (quite correctly) that the firings were illegal under the precedent of Humphrey's Executor, the 1935 Supreme Court case stating FTC commissioners can only be fired for clear cause. Not for simply... existing.

Slaughter and Bedoya are attempting to fast track their case, but, in the interim, Republicans in the Senate just confirmed their third commissioner: Mark Meador of the Heritage Foundation. At his hearing confirmation, Meador unsurprisingly lacked any sort of backbone to acknowledge that the firing of his would-have-been colleagues was wildly illegal and completely undermines agency integrity.

Meador's appointment now gives Republicans a 3-0 majority at the FTC, and Republicans are busy trying to pretend this isn't all illegal, authoritarian dogshit. With the help of mainstream DC gossip rags like Axios, whose coverage is just as feckless and normalizing of the firings as you might expect.

Now begins the next stage in the pseudo-populist performance.

You might recall that during election season, the promise was that the Trump FTC would continue the antitrust enforcement legacy of Lina Khan." Pseudo-populist fascists like JD Vance and Josh Hawley, propped up by contrarian Twitter trolls like Matt Stoller, pretended the Trump FTC would be tough on corporate power. Fascism, bigotry, and corruption, you see, was going to be really good for the plebs.

There were constant refrains about how the GOP, a party that has never seen a monopoly it hasn't been keen to coddle and mindlessly and dangerously deregulate (see: telecom, energy, airlines, banking, insurance, marketing) was serious about antitrust reform now."

Of course that was all a lie, propped up by lazy news outlets and a rotating cast of useful idiots. The GOP harassed tech companies because it wanted them to coddle Republicans and back off the moderation of race-baiting right wing propaganda, a cornerstone of power for a party whose policies (kissing billionaire ass, polluting rivers) aren't popular enough with the public to truly stand on their merits.

After some early pretense at a fight, amoral tech giants were quick to oblige.

These fake claims that Trumpism cares about antitrust reform" and corporate power persist, but they operate simultaneously within a Trump administration and Supreme Court that's busy taking an absolute hatchet to all remaining regulatory independence and corporate oversight. In this way, they get to have their cake and eat it too; pretend to be populist reformers, while fast-tracking corruption.

They get to claim to support Lina Khan's antitrust ideas in the pages of our broken press, while simultaneously shitting all over them and dismantling all cogent federal regulatory autonomy. With authoritarians all logic is reversed. Corruption and oligarch coddling is popular populist reform." Semi-functional oversight is radical mismanagement." Corrupt authoritarianism is the reasonable cure:

House Commerce Committee leaders said the all-Republican FTC will end the partisan mismanagement" allegedly seen under the Biden-era FTC and then-Chair Lina Khan. In the last administration, the FTC abandoned its rich bipartisan tradition and historical mission, in favor of a radical agenda and partisan mismanagement," said astatementissued by Reps. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky) and Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.). The Commission needs to return to protecting Americans from bad actors and preserving competition in the marketplace."

But again, Trumpism is decimating the federal government's ability to meaningfully hold corporate power to account. While simultaneously dismantling federal labor protections, consumer protection standards, and public safety. This isn't really even a debate. The entire claim that Trumpism has any interest in reining in corporate power" or beefing up antitrust reform is a lie.

Meador, like Stoller and others before him, is just the latest useful idiot brought in to sell it.

The FTC is, of course, pursuing five different antirust casesagainst major leading technology companies, most of which were started by Lina Khan, with trials expected to start in the coming months. The Meta case began this week. Those cases will persist, but primarily as a way to perpetuate the lies outlined above and extract even more concessions from the increasingly invertebrate brunchlords of Silicon Valley, something that will likely become more apparent in the remedy" phase.

The goal won't be meaningfully challenging corporate power, it will be using antitrust inquiries to further bully tech executives into feckless compliance with the authoritarian mission. Contrary to claims by some useful idiots, that mission has nothing to do with protecting markets or consumers, and everything to do with ushering in a new golden age of unaccountable corruption.

If you think authoritarians give two fleeting shits about antitrust reform" or reining in corporate power" you're either an absolute rube or part of the con. The hour is getting late for any pretense that any of this is motivated by a good faith interest in healthy markets or the public welfare. And authoritarians are going to just keep pushing until they meet something other than soft pudding in opposition.