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The Betrayal in the People’s Department
Inside the battle that redefined the Republican party’s relationship with corporate power, and a secretive struggle at the Department of Justice that one insider called a “coup.”
It began, as so many stories do in Washington, with a deal. A very big deal. But the real story wasn’t about the mega-merger itself, a transaction that would reshape an industry and test the very definition of monopoly power. The real story was about a promise. It was a promise made by a new, disruptive political force that had ridden into town on a wave of populist anger, vowing to challenge the cozy consensus that had governed Washington for decades—the one that always seemed to benefit the powerful at the expense of the ordinary citizen.
This new force had a name—Trumpism—and it had found an unlikely home in, of all places, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. For years, the division had been the domain of a specific breed of conservative: market-purist, libertarian-minded lawyers who believed that big was not necessarily bad, and that government’s best role in the market was a minimal one. But the Trump administration, in its chaotic and revolutionary way, had seeded the division with a different kind of conservative. These were the populists, the new nationalists who saw corporate concentration as a threat not just to the economy, but to the political liberty of the American people.
They believed they had an ally in the fight. A mission. And then, it all fell apart.
The story, pieced together from whispers that have since grown into a roar, centers on what one conservative journalist, Rob Aman, has called “a coup of the [permanent government] against the populists in the Trump Administration.” At the heart of it was a bitter, internal struggle over a critical merger settlement. On one side were the populist firebrands, convinced the department had the legal and moral authority to block a deal they saw as deeply harmful. On the other was the established guard, the career staff and their allies who, in the final hour, engineered a settlement that allowed the deal to proceed.
To the populists who had felt, for a brief moment, that they were finally steering the ship, it was a stunning betrayal. As one participant in the drama recounted, "we thought that, hey, it looks like, you know, the work that was done by [some] and Jonathan Kanter was kind of holding. And, oh, that, that there was, you know, maybe a new consensus being formed and that...I would have to say has been pretty much shattered."
The figure of Jonathan Kanter looms large. Now the head of the Antitrust Division under a Democratic president, Kanter was then an outside force, a respected lawyer whose skepticism of corporate power was beginning to build a bipartisan coalition. He and his allies saw an opening in the Trump years to fundamentally reorient antitrust thinking, moving it away from a narrow focus on consumer prices and toward a broader concern for market structure, competition, and the corrosive influence of monopoly on a democratic society.
The alleged "coup" was more than just a loss in a single case; it was a brutal lesson in the resilience of the Washington establishment. The populists had the political momentum, the fiery rhetoric, and, they believed, the backing of the president himself. But the permanent architecture of the administrative state—the career staff, the institutional norms, the deep-seated ideologies—proved more formidable. In the end, the system reverted to the mean. The deal went through, the populists were sidelined, and the promise of a new conservative antitrust movement was left in tatters.
What happened inside the Antitrust Division was a microcosm of the larger war within the Republican party and the conservative movement itself. It was a clash of ideologies: the old, business-friendly guard against the new, nationalist populists. It raises a fundamental question that the right is still wrestling with today: What is the proper relationship between capitalism and the state? Is the role of government to get out of the way and let the market work its magic, or is it to actively wield its power to protect the public from the excesses of corporate concentration?
The deal is done, the lawyers have been paid, and the market has moved on. But the fault lines revealed by this bitter fight remain. The populists who lost the battle at the Department of Justice have not gone away. They are angrier, more organized, and more certain than ever that the system is rigged. They are building a new intellectual and political infrastructure, waiting for their next chance to finish the revolution they believe was stolen from them. The coup at the Antitrust Division wasn't the end of a story. It was the beginning of one.
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