According to the RealClearPolitics 2024 general election polling average, former President Donald Trump consistently polls ahead of historically unpopular incumbent Joe Biden.
No matter who prevails in November, Biden’s Department of Justice is putting a massive legal bill on our national credit card. The American people will foot the bill.
This week, DOJ Antitrust Chief Jonathan Kanter addressed the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project conference and rattled off a list of his antitrust attacks on free enterprise. In a shocking display of arrogance, Kanter introduced himself as “representing the people of the United States of America.”
The people’s lawyer? Hardly. Nobody voted for Kanter, a multimillionaire corporate lawyer with an affinity for custom suits and luxury watches. Before helming the Antitrust Division, Kanter represented Spotify, Yelp, Match, and other members of the so-called “Coalition for App Fairness.” It just so happens that Kanter’s former clients have all agitated for the government to break up Apple and Google, the two landmark antitrust cases of Kanter’s tenure.
Kanter’s case against Apple cites the “social stigma” of an Android user’s message bubbles appearing green on iPhones as justification for antitrust cops to swarm in. Kanter’s case against Google presumes that the company has a monopoly on search, even as artificial intelligence is completely upending how we access information. A broken iPhone or degraded Google search helps nobody but Kanter’s former (and likely future) clients, who stand to freeride off of Apple and Google’s tens of billions of research and development spending.
In his remarks, Kanter also celebrated the deals that private companies have abandoned during his tenure, as if smothering economic activity with a fire blanket is a worthy goal of antitrust enforcement. The DOJ killed a merger between Penguin Books and Simon & Schuster that would have given the book publishers a fighting chance to survive in a dying industry. Kanter said that blocking the JetBlue/Spirit merger “restored competition” in the airline industry, a farcical notion given that Spirit is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy thanks to the DOJ.
Much like Biden’s egregious student loan bailout, Kanter’s antitrust agenda also allows the Biden administration to use taxpayer dollars to buy votes. Consider the DOJ’s new antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment, a company that incurred the wrath of tens of millions of Taylor Swift fans last year when its website crashed during Swift’s Eras Tour pre-sale event. The DOJ’s case was brought by Swifties for Swifties, as evidenced by DOJ staff wearing Taylor Swift friendship bracelets at the press conference announcing the suit.
Lack of competition is not the issue here – Live Nation competes aggressively with Stubhub, Seatgeek, Vivid, and others. Swifties crashed the website because demand for Eras Tour tickets far outweighed supply. Breaking up Live Nation would only help the scalpers that use bots to gobble up tickets and charge fans exorbitant prices on secondary and gray markets. None of this matters when Kanter’s ultimate goal is to get Swifties to vote for Biden.
It would be harder to dismiss Kanter’s antitrust agenda if he was forthright with the American people about the ultimate goal of his lawsuits. But he is not. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Kanter refused to say if he would seek to break up Apple and Google if he wins his antitrust cases against the companies. Kanter said that he would first need to know how the court ruled before recommending a remedy, a convenient dodge to get out of explaining how breaking up Apple or Google would impact Americans in an election year.
Kanter’s lawsuits will likely fail in court because he does not attempt to prove consumer harm, a Supreme Court-adopted standard that has anchored antitrust law for over five decades. Instead, Kanter views antitrust as a tool to protect individual competitors in a marketplace, consumers be damned.
This is a “heads we win, tails Trump loses” situation for the Biden administration. If Biden wins in November, Kanter will continue to target Biden’s political opponents in court. If Biden loses, Kanter gets to wash his hands of the antitrust lawsuits he has launched and criticize his successors from the sidelines. A future Trump administration would be saddled with unwinnable antitrust cases, and Kanter could go back to working for his former clients in private practice after using his government perch to weaken their competitors.
Instead of weaponizing the Antitrust Division for Biden’s political benefit, Kanter should drop his antitrust crusade.
