Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
Trump conquered America by pulling together a coalition of groups that broadly hate the same things, but who differ sharply in what things they aspire to. This approach creates a broad and therefore powerful coalition, but it's also a brittle one:
Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely eat shit. Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere:
For Trump, the only point of this coalition is to help him amass wealth and power, and so he has established himself as the ultimate arbiter of its conflicts. If you're the leader of a warring MAGA faction, your top winning move is to figure out how getting your way can personally benefit Trump.
Which is why the Epstein scandal has knocked Trump so badly off balance: his coalition partners are unwilling to accept the idea that Epstein's death is a nothingburger, that the Epstein files are a hoax, that Ghislaine Maxwell is the victim of Democratic cabal lawfare. They're insisting that Trump go public with all the messy details of Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, even though Trump has made it abundantly clear that this would be personally disadvantageous to him, likely because of evidence that he sexually assaulted Epstein's underage victims.
As Trump flails about in a bid to prevent an Epstein-driven MAGA crackup, more cracks are appearing. One of these runs straight through the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, which became a generationally important powerhouse under Biden, intervening to prevent monopoly formation and to break up existing monopolies in a way not seen since the 1960s.
There's a strong antitrust wing in the MAGA coalition, the so-called "right populists," many of whom associated themselves with Biden's brilliant FTC chair, Lina Khan, dubbing themselves "Khan-servatives." For Trump – who never met a predatory corporate monster he didn't love – these MAGA trustbusters are useful idiots, because they let him practice "boss-politics antitrust":
You see, every major corporation in the US is a flagrant violator of antitrust law (thanks to decades of comatose antitrust enforcers). What's more, every major corporation in the US is hoping to violate more antitrust laws, primarily through illegal, anticompetitive mergers. For Trump, this presents a golden opportunity: given that there are so many guilty companies out there in the world, he can selectively prosecute the ones that he wants to make an example of and/or extract tribute from.
This is what happened with the Colbert cancellation: Paramount wanted permission to complete a obviously illegal, anticompetitive merger with Skydance. Trump launched a bullshit suit against Paramount for not being sufficiently mean to Kamala Harris during the election. Paramount settled this suit – which Trump had a 0% chance of winning – for $16m, which is to say, they gave Trump a $16m bribe under the flimsiest of pretexts. Then, when Colbert made fun of them for doing this and Trump squawked, Paramount fired Colbert and cancelled his show. Finally, the merger was approved, on condition that Trump be allowed to place a political minder within CBS's news organization who would prevent them from publishing statements that Trump disliked in either his personal or governmental capacity. This is as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as the Paramount suit was, but if Paramount goes along with it, who's got standing to challenge the deal?
That's where this all gets interesting: Donald Trump isn't the first president to hit on this strategy. Richard Nixon (AKA Trump beta 0.9) ordered his Justice Department to walk away from a case blocking one of International Telephone and Telegraph's illegal mergers because ITT had donated $400,000 to the RNC (yes, this is small ball compared to Donald Trump's scams, but again, Nixon was just the beta test).
This enraged Congress (remember when Congress used to get enraged?) that Sen John Tunney introduced legislation that gives broad swathes of the public standing to challenge the DOJ when they appear to take bribes in exchange for favorable antitrust rulings. Under the Tunney Act, merger settlements that are "against the public interest" can be halted by a federal judge.
Which brings me back to the MAGA coalition crackup. Last week, there was an attempted coup in the DOJ's Antitrust Division:
At issue was one of those "Kahnservative" antitrust enforcements. Right after the Trump inauguration, HPE and Juniper Networks, two of the biggest enterprise WLAN companies, announced a $14b merger, which was immediately opposed by Trump's new DOJ antitrust enforcers. Trustbusters took this as a sign that Trump was going to let his "right populist" wing hold the whip-hand over corporatist parts of his coalition.
But by June, the DOJ moved to settle the case, dropping the announcement after close-of-business on a Friday, which is as close as the government is legally allowed to come to simply not mentioning it at all. The merger would proceed with the most pro-forma, nonsensical, weaksauce conditions. HPE's shares shot up by 11% and some insider trader made a killing exercising a gazillion HPE call options just before the announcement dropped:
One of Trump's mouthiest coalition members, the MAGA influencer Mike Davis, had been a vocal opponent of the merger, but after it sailed through, we learned that he'd gotten a seven-figure job with HPE to serve as their fixer with the Trump administration:
AG Pam Bondi's Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle overruled the DOJ's antitrust boss, Gail Slater (a former JD Vance staffer) and accepted the bullshit HPE deal. Various Trumpies spoke out against it, like Laura Loomer, who posted an outraged jeremiad against the merger deal, then deleted it (Loomer claimed that Mizelle had waded into the deal in order to help his wife, Judge Kathryn Mizelle, secure a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals):
As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, this is a disturbing precedent, given all the antitrust cases currently being fought by the DoJ, involving Apple, Google, Visa, Livenation, Realpage, etc:
But, Dayen says, the Tunney Act means that every one of these deals could be an opening for a Tunney Act challenge, which would include "communications between agents of the companies and employees of the United States." It would force the judges in the case to determine "whether lobbying concerns took precedence over the public interest." And the judge who's overseeing the HPE/Juniper deal is a Biden appointee, Casey Pitts, who worked for a firm specializing in labor, environmental and civil rights cases.
So this is an opportunity to demonstrate that Trump's DOJ is a pay-for-play shop, something that will help the "right populist" side of the MAGA coalition whip up their supporters against the corporatist wing. This is a pretty good gambit, especially given how much parts of the MAGA coalition hate Big Tech:
This isn't anywhere near as big as the Epstein scandal, but nevertheless, it's a situation in which Trump's own self-interest can only be served by doing something that his most vocal and easily enraged base hate. It's another fracture line in the coalition that a smart opposition (yeah, I know) could hammer on.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
In 2024, it was just possible to pretend that Trump’s populist bombast might translate into a real antitrust policy. His VP pick, then-Sen. JD Vance, provoked dramatic pearl-clutching from the Wall Street Journal with his avowed support for muscular corporate regulation.
But corporations were never fooled. They plowed a record $239 million into Trump’s inauguration fund — more than double the $109 million he raised in 2017, and almost four times what Biden raised in 2021 (albeit during covid).
Among the well-wishers was Live Nation Entertainment, which contributed $500,000 to the party. That turned out to be a pretty good investment.
On Monday, the Trump Justice Department ended a federal antitrust lawsuit against the concert behemoth, allowing it to hang on to Ticketmaster and the hundreds of concert venues that make up its stranglehold on America’s live music market.
The mid-trial settlement blindsided the 39 states and the District of Columbia that had joined as co-plaintiffs and infuriated the federal judge overseeing the case. It’s likely to infuriate the fans, too, as they continue to see massive Ticketmaster surcharges — service fees, platinum fees, per-order fees, payment processing fees, facility fees, magical money-sh*tting unicorn fees — on top of already sky-high ticket prices.
And the pain may be just beginning. In September, Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino said “the concert is underpriced and has been for a long time.”
[...]
Break it off?
In May 2024, the Justice Department, along with 39 states and the District of Columbia, filed an antitrust lawsuit against LiveNation. The complaint detailed the flywheel, the Oak View Group collusion, the TEG threats, the exclusive ticketing contracts, and the fee extraction machinery in exhaustive, damning detail. It demanded that the company spin off Ticketmaster, effectively reversing the 2010 merger that created the juggernaut.
Blessing that merger was not the Obama administration’s finest hour. Back in 2010, Live Nation was the country’s second-largest primary ticketer and hoping to eliminate the nascent competition. The DOJ greenlit the deal after Live Nation agreed not to retaliate against venues that signed with Ticketmaster competitors. A DOJ official involved in the review later acknowledged to the New York Times that lawyers had considered litigation but thought it “virtually impossible” to win, in part because the music industry was so closely knit that it was “very hard to find credible witnesses” willing to testify against the combined company.
This time around, the government made a different calculation. And after 15 months of discovery, prosecutors amassed enough proof to survive a motion for summary judgment.
[...]
The settlement is a playful slap on the wrist. Live Nation’s damages to the states are capped at $280 million — less than one percent of its 2025 revenue. The company retains Ticketmaster, although it must agree to allow venues to use multiple ticketers on a new “platform sharing” system and to open its amphitheaters to other promoters. And Live Nation’s fees are capped at 15 percent of ticket price at venues it owns.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it a “betrayal of every music lover and concertgoer exploited by Live Nation-Ticketmaster” and noted that the Trump administration had “ousted the DOJ’s antitrust enforcer” before cutting the deal.
Judge Subramanian was apoplectic at the abuse of court resources.
“It shows absolute disrespect for the court, the jury and this entire process,” he fumed. “It is absolutely unacceptable.”
But the judge isn’t half as furious as the states, who’ve been left holding the bag. In joint federal-state antitrust litigation, the Justice Department will always take the lead — after all, it has the greatest resources and the most experience enforcing federal law. The state co-counsels might provide support, particularly when it comes to their state-law claims. But the feds are the ones who prepare witnesses, issue subpoenas, and craft a trial strategy. Now, the DOJ is abandoning the field, and actually taking their witnesses with them.
That’s because, before the DOJ can finalize its settlement, it has to satisfy the requirements of the Tunney Act, which was passed passed in 1974 after it emerged that Richard Nixon’s DOJ had dropped antitrust cases against International Telephone & Telegraph shortly after the company donated $400,000 to the Republican National Committee. That’s about $3.1 million adjusted for inflation — much less than the Live Nation’s $500,000 inauguration check, although that figure doesn’t include Davis, Conway, and Grenell.
Under the Act, the court must investigate the proposed settlement and ensure that it’s in the public interest. It’s rare for a judge not to approve a settlement under the Tunney Act, but the feds will almost certainly rely on the same expert witnesses they designated for trial if and when they have to defend the agreement in court. And if the states are adverse to the settlement, as 27 of them have said they are, then they’ll have to attack those witnesses they were relying on for their case in chief — a case they were never planning on having to make themselves.
The DOJ backs out of the Ticketmaster antitrust suit, refuses to punish the company for their reckless ticket price gouging.
