The Trump antitrust team is launching an aggressive effort to dismantle what analysts are calling a “lawfare legacy” left behind by the Biden White House — a flurry of ideologically motivated lawsuits rushed out the door in its final weeks.
The first casualty in the crackdown: the FTC’s antitrust suit against PepsiCo. The case had been filed just three days before Trump’s inauguration under an obscure 1930s law and drew immediate fire from legal experts for its shaky economic underpinnings.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson didn’t hold back. “Taxpayer dollars should not be used for legally dubious partisan stunts,” he said. “The FTC’s outstanding staff will instead get back to work protecting consumers and ensuring a fair and competitive business environment.”
According to Thomas Willcox, an antitrust attorney and former Deputy Attorney General in the Antitrust Section in the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, the Pepsi case was just one of more than 40 legal actions filed in the final month of the Biden administration, including major lawsuits targeting Visa and John Deere. All were filed within days — or in some cases, hours — of the presidential transition.
“Such an aggressive posture in the eleventh hour is highly unusual, and it speaks to just how much of an emphasis the Biden administration placed on broadening classical interpretations of U.S. antitrust law to better fit its economic world view,” Willcox said.
Trump’s Department of Justice is now drawing a hard line.
At April’s Little Tech Summit, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater emphasized that, while it will forcefully go after Big Tech and other predatory monopolies, and the new antitrust regime will be rooted in serious economic analysis, not ideological crusades. “We are expected to have a testifying expert before going to trial,” she said.
In a separate interview, Slater slammed the previous administration’s regulatory approach, saying it “saps economic opportunity by stifling rather than promoting competition.” Her bottom line: “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign, we’ll just get out of the way.”
Of the nearly 40 other legal actions that the Biden-era antitrust team took in its last days in office, the easiest next target for the administration may be the Biden DOJ’s case against Visa.
Immediately before the inauguration, the DOJ asked the extremely partisan Southern District of New York — which is where Team Biden filed the case — to show no mercy to the company.
The administration tried to pin some of the blame for its inflation onto the company’s merchant debit card fees, which, according to Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Finance Lulu Wang, amount to just 44 cents for the average $60 Visa debit card transaction. Critics say the DOJ’s case was less about facts than about finding a scapegoat for inflation.
“Even on the economic front, Biden’s team used lawfare to distract from their inflationary failures,” said Trump adviser Bruce LeVell, “suing Visa over standard debit card fees that it claimed raised the price of ‘nearly everything.’” Former congressman Matt Gaetz echoed that sentiment, calling the Visa lawsuit “a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Bidenomics.”
Analysts believe the FTC’s retreat in the Pepsi case is just the beginning. More withdrawals are expected in the weeks ahead, as Trump’s legal team works to unwind what it sees as a sweeping misuse of federal power. The goal, they say, is simple: end the lawfare, and restore the rule of law.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
