from the everything-is-very-broken dept
I don’t mean to harp on this, but a central promise of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would “take aim at big tech,” protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even “continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan.” The press was filled with endless stories credibly parroting these sorts of claims, all day, everyday.
Six months later and it’s nothing but corruption and cronyism as far as the eye can see. The Trump administration and its courts have effectively destroyed regulatory independence, federal consumer protection, and public safety oversight. Massive, terrible mergers are rubber stamped with reckless abandon, provided companies show authoritarian leadership they’re racist and feckless enough.
A recent report by nonprofit consumer advocacy firm Public Citizen calculated that the Trump administration has frozen regulatory action for at least 165 corporations under investigation for a wide variety of abuses, crimes, and fraud. Many of them where the exact kind of “big tech” companies that the Trump administration repeatedly claimed they’d be tough on:
“In six months, the Trump administration has already withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 corporations of all types – and one in four of the corporations benefiting from halted or dropped enforcement is from the technology sector, which has spent $1.2 billion on political influence during and since the 2024 elections.”
The press hasn’t really explained this to the public very well, but effectively all U.S. public safety, labor, consumer, and other protections are dead in the water, something that will inevitably result in mass illness, disability, and death. The majority of efforts to hold corporations accountable now routinely run into Trump-stocked courts that will insist agencies have overstepped their ever-dwindling regulatory authority. It’s radical extremism, but it’s never framed as extremism in the press.
Despite the “feud” between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, this has proven particularly beneficial to guys like Musk, who have seen more than 40 different regulatory inquiries into his companies just magically evaporate in a little over six months. Dodgy financial fraudsters in the crypto space have also been massive beneficiaries of the outright assault on corporate oversight.
It’s the golden age of corruption, much of the damage will be permanent, and the impact will reverberate for a generation or longer. This is, curiously, not of interest to the press. Despite the fact the horrors over the horizon will offer endlessly opportunity for hyperbolic headlines.
I seem to recall several years of claims from pundits and media outlets that Trump was going to be “tough on big tech” and would be “serious about antitrust.” In reality, as I tried to warn repeatedly in the run up to the election, Trump was simply seeking leverage that he could use to bully tech companies into being friendlier to authoritarians and authoritarian propaganda (quite successfully, as it turned out).
Unsurprisingly, authoritarians don’t care about healthy markets, robust competition, or the public interest, they care about their own personal wealth and power. Everything else is bullshit. Yet, curiously, the consolidated, corporate U.S. press doesn’t seem nearly as interested in covering our day to day corruption and cronyism as they were in propping up Trump’s fake populism during the the last election season.
So instead, we get coverage like this over at Axios, that normalizes the fact that U.S. authoritarians are now maintaining a running list of companies that are appropriately deferential to our mad, idiot king.
Filed Under: authoritarian, consolidation, corruption, crime, deregulation, doj, oversight, regulators
