Gail Slater, the head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division, resigned Thursday after reportedly losing the support of key cabinet officials — leaving behind a record that should trouble anyone who expected the Trump administration's trustbusters to actually bust trusts.
Her tenure's marquee case, the antitrust suit against Google, failed to secure a breakup of the internet giant or any penalty beyond what most onlookers considered a slap on the wrist. The biggest monopoly case in a generation ended not with a bang, but with Google's business model essentially intact.
And then there were the mergers she approved.
As Breitbart News noted, Slater greenlit the Disney-FUBO merger. She approved the NFL-Disney merger without even a second request review — the standard deeper examination that signals regulators are taking a deal seriously. Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been actively taking on Disney, investigating The View for violating equal time rules and publicly noting the importance of not approving anti-competitive deals from monopolistic companies like Disney.
So one arm of the administration was challenging Disney's market dominance while Slater's DOJ was waving Disney's deals through without serious scrutiny. That's not a policy disagreement — it's a contradiction.
The one major merger she did block — the HPE-Juniper deal — drew concerns from Trump administration intelligence officials and MAGA leaders such as Charlie Kirk, who argued that killing the deal would help empower Huawei. Whether or not that argument is decisive, it's notable that Slater chose to flex enforcement muscle on a deal where national security figures wanted it approved, while giving Disney a pass.
Before joining the DOJ, Slater served as a member of the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn. The group's report offers a window into the intellectual circles she traveled in — and they weren't exactly free-speech friendly.
The Working Group called for "scalable solutions" to stop social media companies from:
If that language sounds familiar, it should. It's the same framework that was used to justify sweeping content moderation campaigns against conservative voices for years. The report went further, praising Big Tech for specific acts of censorship:
"Removing apps like Infowars for spreading COVID-19 disinformation" and "deleting misleading tweets from major political figures such as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro."
The Working Group also championed a:
"Recognition by platforms of their moral/de facto responsibility as good corporate citizens for the content posted on their platforms."
Translation: Big Tech should police speech, and the policing they've already done — including against right-leaning outlets and world leaders — is the model to follow. This is the intellectual ecosystem that produced the person running antitrust enforcement for the Trump DOJ.
The reaction to Slater's resignation tells its own story. Luther Lowe, head lobbyist for Y Combinator and formerly Yelp's top lobbyist, posted on X:
"This is not a good development for those who care about little tech."
Lowe personally gave over $150,000 to Democrats and not a cent to Republicans. His boss, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan, co-hosted a "Little Tech for Harris" fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi during the 2024 election. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman co-hosted the same event.
When the people mourning your departure from a Republican administration are Democratic mega-donors who fundraised for Kamala Harris with Nancy Pelosi, it's worth asking whose interests were actually being served.
Even left-wing commentator Daniel Dayen of the American Prospect framed the resignation as a loss, posting on X that Slater was defeated by lobbyists who made:
"Corrupt deals with corporate monopolists for millions of dollars."
The left sees Slater as one of theirs who got pushed out. That alone should clarify where she stood.
Slater's departure leaves unfinished business. A proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Bros remains under review, and Slater's stance on the deal was described as unclear. Her successor will inherit that decision — along with the broader question of whether the DOJ's antitrust division will match the energy that Brendan Carr and others in the administration have brought to reining in consolidated corporate power.
Conservative populism's promise on antitrust is straightforward: the government shouldn't pick winners among corporate giants, and consolidated power — whether in tech, media, or entertainment — threatens the competitive markets that make free enterprise work. That promise requires enforcers who actually enforce, not appointees whose prior work championed Big Tech's right to censor and whose tenure is defined by waving through mega-mergers for companies the rest of the administration is actively challenging.
Slater is gone. The question now is whether her replacement understands the assignment.
