Trump Destroys Whatever Was Left Of U.S. Corporate Oversight, Calls It “America First Antitrust”
While there was a lot to criticize the Biden administration about, it did at least try to shift the balance back toward antitrust reform (see: Lina Khan), boosting competition, and occasionally trying to help labor (see: the noncompete ban). This desperately upset America's richest assholes, which is why so many of them have rushed to throw their support behind dim authoritarian zealots.
As America's richest assholes hoped, Trumpism has taken an absolute hatchet to environmental law, consumer protection, regulatory independence, and the last vestiges of U.S. corporate oversight, all while lying to gullible rubes about how this is actually looking out for the little guy.
This is, corporate media and a huge swath of the electorate will be surprised to learn, going to result in years of terrible things, including mass fatalities, institutional failures, and all sorts of avoidable chaos.
But our idiot king is only getting started. After his Supreme Court butchered all regulatory independence and corporate oversight, he's been using executive orders to destroy whatever functional federal governance hasn't already been gutted by his corrupt courts or the couch-locked tween nerds at DOGE. And he's unwinding any of the Biden executive orders that actually did any good.
Like this week, when Trump issued an executive order revoking Biden's EO attempting to restore some semblance of competitive balance to the U.S. economy. That order spawned some useful and popular things, like Lina Khan's crackdowns on right to repair abuses, the investigations into big tech monopolization of ad markets, the ban on noncompetes, efforts to make cancelling services easier, attempts to avoid coordinated corporate suppression of wages, and more.
These initiatives had their warts but it was the closest the U.S. - with a Congress literally too corrupt to pass meaningful reform - had gotten to actual antitrust, labor, and competition reform in a generation.
Trump's latest executive order takes a hatchet to all of that. The EO itself doesn't bother to explain itself, but Trump's DOJ lied to media outlets, insisting that destroying corporate oversight, popular consumer protections, and labor rights was an embrace of America first antitrust":
The justice department welcomed Trump's revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an America first antitrust" approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the overly prescriptive and burdensome approach" of theBiden administration."
That is absolute, incoherent gibberish. This idea that Trumpism cares about antitrust reform" was a big lie pushed by the Trump camp during the last administration and during this latest election season, often propped up by a lazy press, and a smattering of useful idiots like Matt Stoller. This stuff was always pseudo-populist performance, designed to dress up fascism as somehow good for the everyman.
In reality Trumpism takes coddling industry to entirely new levels of extremism. Add in Trump's desire to see companies punished if they're not appropriately feckless or racist enough, and you've got a giant authoritarian mess that's only getting worse.
Many major corporate executives still love this stuff. They view the rubber stamped mergers, tax cuts, and devastation of regulatory oversight as a net win. Most of them don't really think that all the other stuff, like the destruction of democracy, the corruption of the legal system, or the racial profiling of minorities will impact them in their Soho town homes or oversized Palo Alto compounds.
This blind complicity, ignorant of the fact you can't strike a bargain with authoritarianism, is precisely how Russia fell into its authoritarian hellscape, resulting in many prominent executives having their assets stolen by the state - or suffering accidental falls out of twenty-story windows. We're not there yet, but we're absolutely headed that direction and it's not remotely subtle.
Before that, however, we have to live through a concussive series of systemic failures to government systems most of the public takes for granted. You'd like to hope that these shocks to the system wake up a heavily propagandized and befuddled electorate who don't quite yet grasp the extremism at hand, or the mass suffering, fatalities, and widespread consumer and labor harms waiting just over the horizon.