The Trump administration’s antitrust honeymoon is over

“It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.”

That quote was first delivered by mob boss Michael Corleone in The Godfather, but last Monday, it became the title of a speech by the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief Omeed Assefi. At a George Washington University event co-hosted with the publication MLex, Assefi described an agency firing on all cylinders, standing strong against bad corporate actors when warranted, but being open to reasonable negotiation to reach the strongest possible result.

Implicitly, Assefi was responding to months of complaints that his agency was bowing to corporate lobbyists and striking weak settlements. Last summer, two top deputies to Assefi’s former boss, Gail Slater, were fired for what the agency called “insubordination”; one later claimed two Justice Department officials had “perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law.” In February, Slater abruptly departed the agency, following reports that she’d been sidelined on key decisions (which the DOJ denied). Weeks later, the agency settled its high-profile battle with Live Nation-Ticketmaster in a decision industry players described as baffling. And just days before Assefi’s speech at GW, The Wall Street Journal published the fullest account yet of the events leading up to Slater’s departure and the settlement with Live Nation, describing backroom dealings between the Trump administration and MAGA-aligned lobbyists like Mike Davis, who tweeted, “Good riddance” when Slater left. The DOJ has denied any untoward dealings.

At the Antitrust Division, though, Assefi said his staff was “tuning out the noise and focusing on helping the American people who we are so privileged to serve.” The Division’s job, he said, is to engage in an “unrelenting pursuit of holding wrongdoers accountable.” He then quoted Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II: “this is the business we’ve chosen.”

Much of the antitrust world seems markedly skeptical. As lawyers descended on DC for the American Bar Association’s annual Antitrust Spring Meeting last week, hope that President Donald Trump’s administration would take anti-monopoly concerns seriously seemed deflated. Former enforcers warned of creeping corporate influence and a backsliding of enforcement. While Assefi and other officials pushed back on the criticism, onetime allies questioned whether they’d ever been serious about enforcing the law.

“We are shocked, shocked at any suggestion that there’s politics in antitrust enforcement at the federal level”

At an event later in the week, Roger Alford, one of Slater’s fired antitrust deputies, compared Assefi to a different cinematic criminal: corrupt police chief Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca. The acting antitrust chief was “doing his best Captain Renault impression of, ‘I’m shocked, shocked that there’s gambling in this establishment,’” Alford said. “And essentially what we have now is disingenuous claims that we are shocked, shocked at any suggestion that there’s politics in antitrust enforcement at the federal level.”

Now, the question on most people’s lips isn’t whether the Trump administration cares about antitrust — it’s whether anyone else has the resources to step in.

During the first year of Trump’s second administration in 2025, a delicate coalition of bipartisan populist antitrust enforcement was still tenuously holding together. The week of that Spring Meeting saw Slater speak at a Y Combinator event in downtown DC that hosted both former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan — whom Vice President JD Vance had once praised as one of the few Biden officials “doing a pretty good job.” But the administration was already pushing potential allies away. The DOJ and Federal Trade Commission had barred leaders from attending the Spring Meeting, believing the ABA aligned with Democrats. The administration had gutted federal regulatory agencies, raising questions about how they could still function as effective watchdogs.

Freed of their employment and thus the Trump administration’s restrictions, both Slater and Alford appeared at the Spring Meeting this year. Slater was met with applause during her surprise appearance on the keynote panel. “I’m really happy to be here this year while I still have my law license,” Alford quipped, appearing to reference a conservative effort to have him disciplined by the DC bar for speaking out about what he saw at the DOJ.

While some individuals and a large chunk of Republican state AGs still appear committed to big monopoly trials, former allies appear shaken by the administration’s recent settlements. “We should have as our working assumption that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission will not engage in serious enforcement of the antitrust laws for the next three years,” Alford said on a panel at the ABA event. One exception, he said, might be Big Tech cases where he says there’s lobbyists “on both sides and so they kind of cancel each other out.” Those cases could include an appeal of a remedies ruling in the Google search case, an appeal of the FTC’s loss in the Meta alleged monopolization case, and two additional alleged monopolization cases that haven’t yet gone to trial against Amazon and Apple.

Speaking with reporters after, Alford expressed surprise at how everything had unfolded in the past year. “We just didn’t know that we were going to be overruled in the way that we were. I mean, it never happened like that in the first administration ever,” Alford said. He believed Slater was and is “a true populist” who “wanted to enforce the laws, and we were kind of all just shocked by it all.” Asked if higher-ups at the DOJ were ever serious about aggressive antitrust enforcement, Alford was unsure. “I guess not. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to tell.”

Former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, a Democrat who was fired by President Donald Trump last year, said he’s also not sure whether this administration was ever serious about going after Big Tech and monopolies generally. “I think some people were, but I don’t know,” he told The Verge on the sidelines of an event hosted by American Economic Liberties Project (AELP).

“This is a very specific brand of governing that I think is very separate from what you’re seeing at the state level”

Bedoya and Alford are among those who are now placing their hopes in state enforcers to carry the torch for aggressive antitrust enforcement. There’s reason to do so: while six states with Republican AGs settled alongside the DOJ, 34 AGs chose to continue litigating against Live Nation, including 13 Republicans. Several state AGs have committed to taking on other cases that federal enforcers have chosen not to, like the merger between media companies Nexstar and Tegna. Bedoya pointed to several Republican AGs he believes are carrying out aggressive antitrust enforcement, and said, “it’s really important to separate what’s happening with this administration, with people who call themselves Democrats and Republicans. This is a very specific brand of governing that I think is very separate from what you’re seeing at the state level.”

“What is happening right now is not normal, it is not acceptable, and it is dangerous. And the extent to which people become tolerant of this state of affairs, that poses a long-term threat to our future,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, said at the AELP event. “Right now, we are seeing states and state attorneys general as a check on lawlessness and corruption at the federal level that we haven’t seen since Watergate.”

Weiser, who is part of the coalition continuing to litigate the Live Nation case, said they have “more evidence of a monopoly abusing its monopoly power than I thought I might ever see in my lifetime … if you think about the delta from the quality of the evidence to the weakness of the settlement, it’s embarrassing.” Live Nation has denied the claims and is currently putting on its defense in court.

“If you think about the delta from the quality of the evidence to the weakness of the settlement, it’s embarrassing”

Still, state resources are dwarfed by the federal government’s, and the more cases they need to take on by themselves, the more stretched they’ll become. Weiser said that if the federal government wouldn’t enforce antitrust laws, Congress should allocate funds to the states to do so. Absent that, Weiser admitted it won’t be easy to take on the workload, but “when you are forced, when you are stretched, and when you are inspired, there’s a lot you can do.”

At an event hosted by FGS Global and Semafor, the DOJ’s Assefi praised states’ role in enforcing antitrust laws. “I hope the states can bite off as much as they’re saying they’re going to and be able to chew it, but it’s challenging,” he said. He defended the DOJ’s settlement as “a great win” and said they got “more relief than anyone in history ever has against Live Nation.” That relief includes a cap on some Ticketmaster service fees, more transparency for artists, and letting other promoters book into 13 amphitheatres it operates. Up to this point, no one else has gotten as much out of the company as his team did, he said.

“Lobbyists weren’t created in 2025”

Responding to claims of undue corporate influence on stage next to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Assefi shook off the criticism as typical politics. “I think it’s important to know that lobbyists weren’t created in 2025. They’ve been around for a long time,” Assefi said. “We’ll meet with anybody… but that doesn’t entitle you to anything and certainly not entitled to outcomes.” News reports make those lobbyists “seem much more powerful and stronger than they are,” he said. “We sometimes read these articles and you just laugh like, ‘Oh, really?’”

Ferguson’s tone was more defiant. “There’s lobbying. It’s Washington. It doesn’t affect my decision-making,” Ferguson said. “I get that the press enjoys the salaciousness of it. I also am convinced that part of what’s going on here is that the press enjoys writing stories about people who in the last administration, and the administration before that, weren’t lobbyists because all the lobbyists were Democrats on K Street. And now it’s some Republicans, and it’s really fun for the press to write about.”

The Trump administration’s “strictly business” approach ostensibly amounts to something friendlier than gangster tech regulation. There’s no threat of leg-breaking — just the promise of cutting mutually beneficial deals. Is that a viable substitute for playing antitrust cop? The results of the Live Nation trial might offer some indication: If the states lose, the DOJ’s settlement might remain the largest concession extracted from the company, but if they win, it could look like a weak compromise. The upcoming Big Tech cases will test the limits of corporate lobbying and the strength of agencies to play hardball. In the meantime, states may find themselves wondering if their federal counterparts are leaving the gun and taking the cannoli.

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• Lauren Feiner