Trump is no trustbuster

The Justice Department’s lawsuit to block AT&T’s proposed purchase of Time Warner asks us to believe that the Trump administration has suddenly joined the trust-busting vanguard, lurching not only away from its own invariably pro-corporate reflexes but also to the left of recent Democratic predecessors. That would be a hard sell even if President Trump hadn’t offered a simpler impetus: his abiding hatred for a particular Time Warner property, CNN.

Administration officials could, of course, have good reasons

for opposing the deal. The trouble is that Trump has made it impossible to trust the government’s motives.

The merger would give a major Internet and television service provider — AT&T, which owns DirecTV — control over valuable content such as HBO’s. The Justice Department isn’t alone in noting that this could allow the new company to wield unfair advantages that could stifle competition.

But the government hasn’t fought such so-called vertical consolidations of companies that don’t compete with each other for decades. Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, for example, was approved with a number of conditions by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2011. Even the lawyer leading the government’s case against the merger said in an interview last year that he didn’t expect it to be controversial.

Moreover, the Trump administration has shown precisely the opposite instincts in nearly every other case by pushing to roll back regulations. The day after the government’s lawsuit was filed, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman announced his intent to dismantle net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from discriminating against content through differential access or pricing. It’s hard to imagine a clearer rejection of the principle the Justice Department claims to be upholding by opposing the AT&T deal.

It’s no wonder, then, that observers have searched for an ulterior motive and readily found one in Trump’s obsessive loathing for Time Warner’s CNN. Trump frothed at the network on Twitter as recently as last week, calling it “bad” and “FAKE.” He previously posted a video from (speaking of fake) his pro wrestling days in which a CNN logo is crudely superimposed over the face of the man he is pummeling. He even mentioned CNN in the context of a threat to block the merger during a campaign speech last year.

In short, Trump is far less interested in protecting consumer choice than he is in menacing the free press.