Gabe Kaminsky

Oh, hey, Steve, thank you so much for having me.

And yeah, the piece Steve is referencing here is actually one I quoted him in that went up in the Free Press last week.

And our story aims to provide readers kind of a window into how antitrust is an issue that animates a lot in the MAGA base, animates certainly the host of this show, Steve.

And the notion of sort of going after corporations and going after corporate influence.

But this basically in the Trump administration, there's been actually a lot of infighting in the antitrust division, in the Department of Justice, at the Federal Trade Commission and even the White House over how exactly tough the Trump administration should be

on major corporations.

And, you know, a part of that played out actually earlier this year in an antitrust case aiming to, that the government had aiming to break up, or sorry, rather block a deal between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks.

And the federal government

the Trump administration, some officials there believed that they wanted to block this deal to allow for more competition in the free market.

However, HPE brought in certain MAGA operatives who were aiming to convince the administration to settle this case to be more favorable

To this major corporation and this other company.

And actually, they did end up settling with the company.

And that that sort of prompted a whole lot of tension in the government about what the future of any policy looks like.

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of I think what this story points to is that on antitrust and going after corporate influence, there is sort of this alignment between populist Republicans and more progressive leaning Democrats.

And so actually, after the story, I had people in various parts of that camp who were sort of

Thankful to have information about some of this infighting.

And I had Democrats reach out to me from the last administration who are favorable to Gail Slater, who's in the Department of Justice and runs an antitrust division.

And so, yeah, it's an issue where I think you, Steve, you probably would find a lot of sort of functionally a lot of agreement with progressives on some of these ideas about going after sort of corporate influence.

So one thing I would point out on that Revolver article is I believe, it sounds like it's based off of my story because in my piece, I quoted anonymous Trump administration officials, senior staffers, who are describing their dismay at the Federal Trade Commission and its chairman, Andrew Ferguson, for at least their belief

that the FTC is focused more on partisan investigations related to some of those topics that article appears to be citing, rather than sort of substantive bread and butter antitrust, which at its heart actually isn't a particularly political issue so much as an issue like I think you were describing, a dispositional issue, an issue of how people view government and power and sort of the market, which is like a more populist approach.