Is Trump allowing his antitrust policy to be written by JD Vance?

One element of ongoing palace intrigue surrounding the White House these days relates to the question of how much President Trump is driving all federal policy, versus how much he is being driven by big names in his orbit.

J.D. Vance has been keen to show as little daylight as possible between himself and Trump, but in some areas, it really appears that he is driving the train and Trump is… not.

One of those policy areas appears to be antitrust, where basically the whole administration is Vance people. And their interests may not actually align with Trump’s.

Several of Vance‘s former aides are now in administration jobs that are key for setting antitrust policies that can break up large companies and block mergers.

• Gail Slater, Vance‘s economic policy adviser in the Senate, was confirmed to be assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.

• James Braid now heads the White House’s office of legislative affairs as antitrust bills start to get reintroduced in this Congress. Braid worked for Vance when the VP was in the Senate, and before that was chief of staff to then-Rep. Ken Buck, a leading antitrust proponent.

• Vance‘s deputy policy director, James Lloyd, led the Antitrust Division in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, where he sued technology companies including Google.

• Vance‘s chief of staff, Jacob Reses, previously was a senior policy adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who’s introduced a slew of Big Tech antitrust bills over the past five years.

Trump’s focus with regard to social media really is just “are they being mean to me and my people,” not some deep philosophical interest in combating “bigness.” On the one hand he doesn’t care. But also… he doesn’t care.

The conflict between those two concepts could really become evident if the antitrust enforcers either start looking at Elon Musk and X (as the FTC most definitely did in it’s Lina Khan iteration) or… don’t start looking at Elon Musk and X, while they are doing things like launching suits against Meta.

The general consensus in the legal and business community seems to be that the FTC case against Meta is comically weak. But if they’re going to bring it, you’d better believe that using the same kind of logic and approach, they would and will inevitably find some problem with Musk entities.

There’s been some chatter about this, for what it’s worth. Yeah, it’s coming from the left– but so is pretty much all argument for robust antitrust enforcement against big names in tech. Except when it’s coming from Vance, the beloved “Khanservative.”

If it happens, well, it will pitch Musk against Vance– and it’s hard to see Trump not favoring Musk on that one, given that Musk’s takeover of X has been massively helpful to Trump and Trump fans (certainly more helpful than Vance being on the ticket, which was a net neutral and led to a lot of bad headlines for a stretch last year).

If it doesn’t happen, that’s going to look weird as hell, and probably corrupt as hell. Which would just lend further credence to the notion that the FTC’s action against Meta is bogus and the current crop of Vance-y antitrust enforcers are not behaving in an even-handed way. That’s not a great look when you’re trying to make friends and influence people within, like, the US judicial system– as this administration keeps finding out. It’s also probably a red flag to a future Democratic administration– as if they needed one– to hit Musk hard.

Basically, there’s a risk here that the antitrust enforcers will have proved to have gotten out over their skis bigly and Trump won’t like where this is headed, even if he is quite happy for Mark Zuckerberg– who perhaps thought that his inauguration support would help him dodge this sort of thing– to squirm.

Trump is also not as stupid as he looks to the liberal left of the United States. If we’ve spotted this issue, you’d better believe he has.