Oct 05, 2026
Representative Jamie Raskin spoke on Tuesday, September 29 in Washington, D.C., about what he said is the Trump administration’s corrupt and ineffective antitrust enforcement:
“I’ve never been asked to speak about antitrust law before, and then this is my first time … I got to tell you this other funny story first, which is when Katie McInnes, who works with me, first approached me about this. She said they invited you to come and give all your wisdom about antitrust law and the new Congress and everything, and I had a laugh because I once had an invitation like that from Justice Kennedy, when he was on the Supreme Court, because I’d written a book called *We the Students* about the rights of students in public schools.
And so I told my wife, I was like, Justice Kennedy wanted me to come and address the justices and the clerks and everybody, and he said, “You know, come and give all my wisdom about public education and the Constitution. And so Sarah [Raskin’s wife] never goes anywhere with me, but so I said, “You got to come.”
So she came, and so then we were in the that room off to the side, and I gave my thing, and I retired to what I thought was more than polite applause … I turned to Sarah and said, “So what do you think?” And she said, “Well, I don’t know how much wiser they are, but they’re definitely older.” I’m aware of that dynamic here today, and I always remember what W. H. Auden said, which was that a professor is someone who is speaking while other people are sleeping. So anyway, I’ll try not to. I’m trying to contextualize everything in terms of my constitutional understanding. So, in 1890, when John Sherman of Ohio stood in the well of the Senate to defend his famous antitrust act, he invoked the central analogy, which I believe has inspired American antimonopoly politics from the very beginning of the Republic.
He said this: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. Sherman here drew on the deepest wells of American democratic history, which have rejected monopolies in commerce and trade just as vigorously as monopolies in government and politics, and for the same reason, they both constitute assaults on freedom. Indeed, the great hero of free markets, Adam Smith himself, in his “Wealth of Nations” published in 1776, anticipated the entire field of antitrust law in economics, when he wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Enlightenment liberals of the American Revolution opposed not just the political tyranny of monarchical state power and the economic tyranny of monopoly corporate power, but the inevitable collaboration and codependence between the two. King George conferred monopoly powers on the East India Company, a chartered corporation, and the East India Company in turn bolstered the power of the monarchy in the colonies – an unholy exchange of political favors, kickbacks and bribes.
The Boston Tea Party protesters dumped tea in Boston Harbor because they rejected the monopoly power King George had vested in the East India Corporation, which allowed it to undercut the market price in the colonies, avoid English duties and force other suppliers out of business. From the standpoint of the colonists, King George, the Parliament and the East India Company formed a thick axis of aristocratic privilege for the royal court and oppression of the people. This was a system of unified corruption.
The framers regarded the assimilation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands as “the very definition of tyranny,” as Madison put it. Just as they moved to break up national governmental power into three branches of government, and just as they separated church from state and distributed powers between the national government and the states. They strongly opposed concentrating economic power as a looming autocratic threat to free citizens living and working in free markets.
Jefferson thought that monopolies were such a basic threat to freedom, that he confided his disappointment to Madison that the Bill of Rights itself did not contain an antimonopoly amendment that he favored. Jefferson feared that unchecked corporate power would come to devour the republic and thwart the will of the people and economic freedom. He wrote in 1816 that Great Britain had demonstrated the twin dangers of monarchical and monopolistic power. He said, “I hope we shall take warning from the British example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our money corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a tribal strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.”
Subsequent generations tried to put into federal and state law the principles that Jefferson wanted to describe in the Constitution. The cumulative fights in our history against kings and queens, charter monopolies, slave masters and slave traders, railroad barons, industrial tycoons and tyrants, oil monopolists, union-busting corporate racketeers, price-fixing Wall Street manipulators, and robber barons all led to passage of the Sherman and Clayton acts and other legislation like the Federal Trade Commission Act to protect consumers, workers, and citizens against unfair trade practices and the ravages of monopoly power.
The American progressive trust-busting movement, like the labor movement, had posited the necessity of government intervention to maintain the freedom and the fairness of economic markets. When monopolies and combinations threaten freedom of business people, workers and consumers. American progressives and populists have always said that laissez isn’t fair.
Today we live in an age of renewed concentration and consolidation of both political and economic power. The president has been draining away the Article I powers of Congress, usurping our war powers, our spending powers, our tariff and tax powers, our power to regulate commerce domestically and internationally, and even our power over federal buildings and property installations like the White House, the Kennedy Center and the reflecting pool now a symbol of governmental corruption, which we call the Strait of Warm Ooze.
While Trump steals away the powers of Congress, he centralizes and arrogates all administrative powers to himself through his absolutist unitary executive theory. He is subordinating the law enforcement function of the Department of Justice and indeed the powers of the whole executive branch to his arbitrary will, completely demolishing what we called the administrative states, a century in the making.
He’s fired both Democratic and independent members of the Federal Trade Commission, the Surface Transportation Board, National Labor Relations Board, the EEOC and Librarian of Congress. This is in addition to him eliminating one fell swoop almost immediately after taking office 17 inspectors general who are the nation’s nonpartisan government watchdogs at check within the departments. Trump’s ability to destroy the administrative machinery of government, crush congressional power, intimidate and lie to the judiciary, and routinely violate judicial orders has been augmented by systematic and persistent attacks on the right to vote in democratic power.
The president launched a nationwide campaign of extreme mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression, outrageous assaults on the freedom of speech and press, including attempted purges of the White House press corps and the use of taxpayer money to propagandize the public with campaign commercials dressed up as public service investments. The administration, and its stacked and packed Roberts Court have demolished the Voting Rights Act and have made the president effectively immune from prosecution for felony offenses he commits in office under the putative auspices of his role.
It comes as no surprise then to find in this age of political tyranny and radically concentrated political power, all of the corresponding signs of economic monopoly and conspiracy against free markets. Indeed, it is impossible to disentangle these overlapping strands of material.
The DOJ’s antitrust division is supposed to be there to enforce our competition laws without fear or favor to ensure that American workers, consumers and small businesses are protected against corporate Goliaths who are locking up our markets and bankrolling political campaigns at the same time. Instead DOJ is focused on facilitating pay-to-play political and financial corruption.
Don’t take it from me. That’s what Donald Trump’s own political appointees have told us, as they express outrage at the swamp algae pouring over our entire government and economy. Roger Alford, who served as second in command of the DOJ’s antitrust division, came forward to blow the whistle on the saturation of our antitrust machinery by political and financial corruption.
We invited him to testify as a witness before our committee. He described, }the pervasive practice of lobbyists attempting to corruptly influence antitrust law enforcement at the DOJ.”
He told us corporate lobbyists who’ve made the right friends in the White House now boast of their ability to overrule both the career antitrust experts at DOJ and even Trump’s own attorneys appointed to the antitrust division. In case after case, the administration politically intervened to allow greater concentrations of market power or flagrant abuse of market power in industries like housing, ticketing, technology, finance, media and broadcast, despite explicit warnings from DOJ’s own career lawyers and the president’s own appointees. They are making a mockery of our antitrust laws and turning antitrust enforcement into another opportunity for shakedowns and kickbacks.
Take the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case. For years, artists, consumers, venues and workers have been irreparably harmed by the vertical integration of live entertainment, which has driven up prices for everyone and driven down business for competing venues and ticketers. After more than 15 years of underenforcement by both Democratic and Republican administrations, DOJ finally took the live entertainment monopolist to court. It investigated, found massive evidence of monopolistic conduct and sued for structural separation of the monopolistic company to quote restore competition for the benefit of fans and artists.
As Assistant AG Kanter put it, DOJ was joined by 39 state attorneys general. But after years of investigation, evidence gathering and then trial, the Trump administration cut a backroom deal within an initial settlement framework, establishing $280 million to resolve claims to pay civil penalties to the states, an amount that represents a gentle and loving tap on the wrist: roughly four days of the behemoth’s 2025 revenue.
Equally inexplicable is the settlement relied largely upon behavioral remedies rather than structural ones, and yet it is a decade and a half of just such failed behavioral remedies, including those imposed with much fanfare during Trump’s first term, that have brought us to this place of toothless and feckless enforcement.
The settlement fails consumers, artists and venues. Live Nation promised its employees that it would continue business as usual, and why not? Live Nation’s monopoly practices continued in full force through the antitrust process itself, as the company used its political power to make a mockery of the prosecutorial function.
The settlement reflects a political lockup of the DOJ. Last year, the administration’s head of the antitrust division, Gail Slater was outspoken in her support for the litigation, and she reportedly opposed this sweetheart settlement. By February, she had been forced out, paving the way not only for this episode of corruption, but for a lot more to come in the days ahead. When DOJ finalized its settlement of Live Nation-Ticketmaster, it did so in secret without even informing the lead prosecutor, much less the court, which was treated like a spectator in the courtroom. And when the secret agreement was announced, Judge Subramanian was furious. He denounced his “absolute disrespect for the court, for the jury, for the entire process.”
Now here’s the critical point: When the administration sashayed through with its signed sweetheart settlement at the 11th hour, the states refused to join in this parody of antitrust law. Thirty three of the 39 state AGs, including 13 Republicans that had joined in DOJ’s case, refused to surrender, and by sticking together, much like the White House press corps did last week, the states won. A unanimous jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable on every single count. We still await the remedies phase, but the world can see how the administration, which has turned every facet of our laws and government into a money-making operation for the Trump family, has turned the venerable antitrust division into a pretense in a pay-to-play burlesque show.
The corruption of the live music sector seems quaint and old-fashioned compared to the structural merger of elements of big tech with the White House from inauguration day to the state dinner last week with [Chinese] President Xi. Big AI has had prominent seats at the table, seats that they purchased for a handsome price in political dollars, although a mere pittance to these corporate giants, which position them for major policy victories and financial gains. President Trump has raised more than $800 million dollars since returning to office by directly soliciting corporate leaders, including Big Tech, often demanding contributions in amounts as large as $50 million.
These funds were directed towards his personal and political projects, including the presidential library and the famed White House ballroom. Big Tech has given generously: Google contributing $22 million, Apple around $25 million, while Microsoft gave around $10 million, Amazon roughly $5 million, and Meta upwards of $30 million.
And what is the perfectly predictable transactional result? Well, Big Tech products have been exempted from Trump’s dubious tariffs that are drowning thousands of our small businesses, the president and his AG have dropped ongoing probes against these generous donors and withdrawn harder to file charges for corporate misconduct, union busting and other harms to workers. Big Tech CEOs have even gotten the president’s help to avoid appearing in Senate hearings about the harm that their products caused to kids. Trump has also specifically exploited his powers over mergers to censor and control the press. He’s empowered the Ellison family to expand their Oracle and Skydance media empire and to control TikTok in the U.S. In exchange, the Ellison’s stifled and muzzled criticism of the president in the CBS newsroom, with promises to follow suit at CNN.
Even before Trump got into office, key business leaders saw that to get their deals approved, Palms would need to be greased, while Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount was pending. The target of their acquisition, Paramount greeted incoming official and now chair of the FCC Brendan Carr with $12,000 in Kennedy Center dealer tickets in 2024, an event the incoming chair, an event where the incoming chair gave inside information to Paramount and Skydance on how to ensure approval of the planned merger.
Then Chair Carr sat on the Ellison’s proposed purchase of Paramount to make sure the president got his own respectful down payment bribe from the Ellison family, a $16 million contribution to his presidential library, millions more in free advertising, a promise to install a Trump-friendly minder and censor in the CBS newsroom in the cancellation of the late show with Stephen Colbert because of his MAGA-unfriendly jokes.Only then, after all of this tribute was deposited, did Chair Carr permit this merger to proceed.
When the president publicly stated he wanted CNN under new management, Ellison’s perceived another opportunity to buy up a rival and have DOJ rubber stamp the transaction. Their acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery adds another major film studio, as well as CNN and other streaming platforms, movie titles, and shows to their empire with Trump’s backing. The deal went through without any attention paid to the harm caused to millions of consumers and thousands of workers, writers, actors, directors, or to the serious concerns raised about the prospect of sovereign wealth funds representing countries that have a long history of suppressing dissent, owning a major share of the American media industry.
The Trump administration is crossing an important constitutional line here. Antitrust cannot become a structural tactic for government to subdue and control free speech and the free press. The government cannot be allowed to use antitrust machinery to reward favored and allied speakers and to punish disfavored and opposing speech. The president, with his newly arrogated and declared unitary powers, cannot be allowed to dictate what Americans say, publish, hear or debate, but that’s precisely what’s happening with what antitrust practitioners now call the Trump transaction tax-the concept that antitrust decision making by this administration will depend on political and financial concessions that are not connected in any way to proper antitrust review and analysis. 12 state attorneys general initially stepped in to stop the Paramount merger, calling out the dangerous consolidation being proposed, declaring the merger would lead to quote higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and TV, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors and ultimately audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the United States. The states have settled. The consent is pending before the courts right now. But in the end, the case demonstrated that while state AGs are presently crucial to enforcing our antitrust laws, especially where the federal government abdicates its responsibility. They cannot be a substitute for real vigorous action at the national level.
These cases can be hugely expensive, and the federalist system means that states are way too easily pitted against each other by would-be monopolists who control tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and spending, under President Trump, the DOJ has settled price-fixing cases with an exquisitely gentle touch, not seen in ICE enforcement or treatment of late-night talk show comedians. The DOJ accepts behavioral remedies that will do little to either address underlying illegal conduct or to benefit consumers, we have evidence of competitor meat sellers, landlords, and egg sellers working together to fix prices. And his administration settled these cases rather than getting judgments that would seriously address the underlying conduct. And even when criminal indictments have been secured, a full pardon for bid rigging is still in the offing. Is still in the offing now after an afternoon golf excursion with the president. And these insider policies and bad decisions are not limited to the DOJ. When it was faced with clear evidence that pharmacy benefit managers were working to drive up the price of life-saving drugs like insulin, the FTC decided to settle for terms that not only failed to sufficiently address the underlying conduct, but also did nothing to lower prices for consumers substantially. To be sure, the sickly enforcement of our competition laws predates the Trump administration. No company has been broken up under our law since 1984, when AT&T was 42 years ago. In recent years, even after concluding that Google is a monopolist in CERC, the federal judge in that case decided not to institute meaningful remedies. Another court, also after finding that Google was a monopolist this time in digital ads, also for kids to use the finish line in fields or to break up or any terms that would adequately benefit consumers or meaningfully account for Google’s incentives to boost its monopoly power, Google remains a freewheeling monopolist in several different fields.
These decisions are the legacy of decades of under-enforcement of antitrust law that has bred a terrible, a terrible hesitancy and reticence on the bench. We plainly have a lot of work to do. We must expose the galloping delivery fraud taking place in this administration and pass significant anti-corruption legislation to ensure that across all three branches of government, public servants actually serve the American people rather than helping oligarchs and political threats get rich on backroom deals, we must again confront the market power problem in our country and revive real antitrust machinery to correct it. A wide variety of our markets-national, regional, and local-are dominated by a small number of players within healthcare, big tech, agriculture, financial systems, and other sectors. American families experience this power imbalance in nearly every aspect of our lives. When we see a doctor, we take our pets to the veterinarian. We go grocery shopping. Even when we take our children to soccer practice or call a repairman for the air conditioning, we have lost much of the competitive dynamism that actually keeps prices down, makes wages competitive, improves services, expands consumer choices, and promotes innovation. Obviously, not every large company is exercising monopoly power.
Not every merger is harmful. But across several key industries, consolidation has been a terrible deal for consumers and workers, and it has proceeded without meaningful antitrust scrutiny because of the rise of all of these oligarchical practices, so how do we begin to rebuild the shattered pieces of antitrust? First, we need to establish serious and aggressive oversight of the putative antitrust enforcers. Congressional Republicans have acted like toadies and sycophants, mindlessly rubber stamping the president’s bad deals instead of engaging in meaningful oversight. They say nothing while shady deals cause prices to go up, wages to go down, and economic disparities to widen. We must hold the president’s agents accountable and ensure our government is no longer working just for the president and his family, but instead for all of the people. That means holding all lawbreakers accountable. Justice should not be for sale to anyone, much less to some of the most powerful companies on earth. We will work to root out corruption and bring back free and fair, neutral enforcement of the law. We must pass legislative reforms that restore accountability to the antitrust settlement process.
Currently, antitrust settlements are subject to Tunney Act review by the courts. The Tunney Act was enacted after the abuses of the Nixon era to ensure that federal antitrust settlements serve the public interest. But decades of overly deferential judicial review have left too much room for dubious deals simply to sail through. Recent conflict over DOJ settlements highlight the need for reform, especially where career enforcement lawyers have reportedly objected to bad settlements, or where lobbying and political influence have been allowed to override the facts and override the law. That’s why I am introducing the Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act, which would modernize the Tunney Act by extending judicial review to FTC settlements, requiring disclosure of settlement negotiations, prior offers, side deals, and related communications, temporarily pausing mergers while courts conduct meaningful review, strengthening the standard court-applied settlements, and giving state AGs a right to participate in Tunney Act proceedings.
Antitrust enforcement should never be reduced to a backroom bargain between powerful corporations and powerful politicians. When the government settles a case brought in the public interest, the public deserves transparency, accountability, and judicial independence and vigor. Second, we must promote antitrust federalism. The federal government must work with state governments to make sure that they’ve got the authority and resources they need to act as a further check on dangerous consolidation and abuse of economic power. The last substantive update to our antitrust laws, the passage of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976, 50 years ago, gave the state AGs express authority to sue on behalf of their people. We must support the state AGs so they can break through the swamp of MAGA corruption and stand up to bullying corporate giants. Third, we need serious legislative reforms that provide for robust antitrust enforcement and reverse decades of damage caused by all of the fantasies and mythologies advanced by the Chicago School of Law and economics, this public philosophy has promoted passivity, inactivity, and a substantial increase in concentration in U.S. markets, with the attendant higher prices, suppressed wages and worker rights, and reduced innovation and market entry by small and new businesses.
Congress must pick up every tool available to restore good government and ensure that our foundational antitrust statutes are followed. Antitrust law protects not just consumers but workers, small businesses, innovation, and civic equality. We must explore closing loopholes that enable firms to evade antitrust scrutiny. We must also examine misguided judicial conventions that hamstring the judiciary once liability is found. We must be wary of efforts of powerful political forces to carve themselves out of the laws protecting competition. We must be bold in our willingness to take on sector-specific challenges, especially where they contribute to the shocking affordability crisis that is rocking America today. Finally, in the name of democracy, we must directly challenge the corruption that saturates the executive branch of government. Our antitrust laws form a critical part of the whole constitutional architecture of a free and democratic American society, they are anchored in Congress’s power to regulate commerce in the interests of the people, and they reflect the hard-fought, enduring but always contested American principle that we have no kings and no queens here, no monarchs and no titles of nobility either in the marketplace or in the public square, we have no emperors and no lords, no serfs, no servants and no slaves, no dictators and no autocrats of trade. We have the political freedoms of speech and press, assembly and voting, and the economic freedoms of no involuntary servitude or slavery, equal protection of the laws, due process, and protection against all devices of monopoly, illegal combination, criminal thefts and ripoffs, and unfair trade, business, and consumer practices.
The original slogan of the Republican Party was “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men.” In the spirit of bipartisanship. I’d say we could dust that slogan off and update it to say, “Free speech, free labor, free women and free men, and free and fair markets for all.” Thank you very much for inviting me.”
