By Gayle Trotter

The suddenly warm relationship between President Donald Trump and Silicon Valley would have been impossible to predict in 2017. Throughout his first term, Big Tech—like almost every other American institution—aligned itself with the #Resistance. They censored “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be true, booted conservative social networks from their app stores, promoted left-wing causes like Black Lives Matter, and even suspended the sitting president’s social media accounts. 

Two months into Trump’s second term, things look very different. Industry luminaries like Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai attended the inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg dropped Facebook’s biased “fact-checking” system in favor of an X-style community notes feature. No less notably, Google and Apple both quickly updated their map apps to reflect the Gulf of America’s new name. Eight years ago, they’d have issued strongly worded refusals and then basked in praise from CNN and "The View." 

This shift isn’t the result of multiple Big Tech CEOs organically and independently reevaluating their political beliefs just as a new president took office. It’s the product of changing incentives.

On the one hand, Silicon Valley has been a huge driver of economic growth, which Trump needs if he hopes to bring down deficits without raising taxes or slashing entitlements. Big Tech companies were able to achieve their current size and global dominance due largely to the United States’ balanced approach to regulation and antitrust enforcement, while the hyper-regulated European Union struggles to produce successful start-ups.

On the other hand, the influential populist faction of the GOP is far more comfortable with economic interventionism than the libertarian-leaning Republicans of yesteryear. And they’re especially wary of Big Tech. 

When Lina Khan, President Biden’s FTC chair, launched antitrust lawsuits against Meta and Amazon (and helped the Justice Department conduct investigations into Google that later led to an antitrust suit), The Wall Street Journal responded with dozens of furious editorials. Then-Sen. JD Vance took a different approach, describing Khan in early 2024 as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” His fellow Republicans, Vance hinted, had allowed their deferential attitude toward big business to make them “a little too pro-censorship.” No wonder Jeff Bezos picked this moment to align the Washington Post’s opinion section with “free markets.”

The populist-right Foundation for American Innovation takes a similar line on Big Tech, praising DOJ lawsuits that accuse Google of having “monopolized the advertising technology market” and Apple of “leveraging its gatekeeper power over the app ecosystem to suppress innovation and choice.”

Gail Slater, a former Vance adviser and Trump’s recently confirmed pick to head the DOJ’s antitrust division, embodies this approach to antitrust. She expressed concern about Big Tech in her confirmation hearing and seems poised to carry on Khan’s aggressive policy toward Big Tech, with one industry observer noting that Google “should be shaking in its boots” at the thought of her confirmation.

One of Slater’s first major tasks will be to push for remedies after a federal judge ruled in August that Google is illegally monopolizing online searches. These remedies could go as far as forcing Google to sell off its Chrome web browser, which holds well over half of the U.S. market share.

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At the same time, Slater is unlikely to continue the last administration’s policy of attacking successful companies just because they’re successful. She’s spent time as both an FTC attorney and a tech industry lobbyist, allowing her to understand the issues from both perspectives. As Conservative Partnership Institute vice president Rachel Bovard put it, she’ll use “a scalpel, not a hammer.” 

Khan and her DOJ counterparts broke with the old antitrust consensus by abandoning the consumer welfare standard and aiming instead to “disperse economic and political power.” This led to absurd antitrust actions like suing Visa for “monopolizing” debit card transactions, despite Visa’s 60 percent market share (hardly a monopoly) and the abundance of other ways to pay for things. “Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged, clearly eager to blame the high price of “nearly everything” on a debit card provider rather than on his boss’s disastrous inflationary spending. 

Garland did the same thing in his case against the property management company RealPage, blaming it for making Americans “pay more in rent” when, in reality, the software just reports on what the market is bearing. Rents were high not because of this reporting technology but because of the Biden housing inflation the Biden administration induced.

Once confirmed, Slater appears likely to reject both politicized overregulation and excessive deference to big business, especially Big Tech. Trump clearly isn’t interested in repeating the past mistakes of either party. 

In a Truth Social post announcing Slater as the nominee, Trump wrote that “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”  

In other words, Big Tech’s appeals to its own economic dynamism and to old-school Republicans’ laissez-faire principles won’t cut it anymore. Nor will Silicon Valley CEOs’ Johnny-come-lately embrace of Trump and free speech. There’s a new sheriff in town. Big Tech must adapt or die.

 Gayle Trotter is a lawyer and political commentator in Washington, D.C. You can follow her on X @gayletrotter. Her views are her own.