Trump's antitrust cops are OK with new mergers. Old tech monopolies, not so much.

Updated Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 9:15 PM 5 min read

President Trump's antitrust cops are friendlier frankincense acold astir mergers than their predecessors, but they are refusing to fto up connected 1 salient precedence of the Biden administration: monopoly prosecutions of the nation's best-known tech giants.

Six months into Trump’s 2nd word successful office, his antitrust regulators person already fixed the greenish airy to much than 100 merger transactions, feeding the optimism of Wall Street bankers that caller dealmaking volition person wide enactment successful Washington, D.C.

In June, antitrust enforcers gave a go-ahead to 3 deals worthy a combined $63 billion, including candy elephantine Mars’ $36 cardinal takeover of Kellanova (K), and the DOJ announced a settlement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) allowing it to get bundle developer Juniper.

This month, the DOJ announced that it closed a large investigation into telecom elephantine T-Mobile's (TMUS) $4 cardinal acquisition of USCellular assets that allowed the necktie up to proceed.

Administration officials assertion the approvals are not a escaped walk due to the fact that galore person required pre-merger divestments oregon licensing requirements.

Yet astatine the aforesaid time, Trump's DOJ and FTC person shown nary plans to relent successful a bid of high-stakes authorities prosecutions targeting the competitory tactics of Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Apple (AAPL).

Nor person they shown immoderate signs of unwinding investigations into Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).

That's contempt efforts by the CEOs of these companies to curry favour with Trump, with galore showing up successful idiosyncratic for the president's inauguration successful January. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried unsuccessfully this outpouring to halt a authorities proceedings against his institution from going forward.

“The disapproval coming into this medication is that each of these Big Tech CEOs that were astatine the inauguration were going to get sweetheart deals; that they were going to settee these cases for pennies connected the dollar," said Slade Bond, erstwhile main lawman adjunct lawyer wide successful the Biden administration's Office of Legislative Affairs.

"And that conscionable hasn't happened."

The Trump attack to caller mergers, however, is "different," Bond said, explaining that Trump’s regulators person made it wide that they're much unfastened to structuring deals successful a mode that Biden's DOJ antitrust caput Jonathan Kanter and erstwhile FTC seat Lina Khan were not.

Arnold & Porter said the latest approvals intelligibly show the administration’s willingness to negotiate.

The attack with mergers is "a noteworthy displacement distant from the anterior administration," according to a recent note published by the Washington D.C.-based instrumentality firm.