For the past four years, the federal government has been at war with Big Tech. President Biden’s Justice Department’s explosive parting shot is a puzzling lawsuit aimed at breaking up Google. The lawsuit contains a variety of proposals, including eliminating the Chrome browser, which almost seems designed to undermine the American economy by discouraging investment, stifling innovation, and creating unnecessary barriers to consumers’ access to technology.
If Donald Trump continues the antitrust measures he inherited from Biden, he will needlessly undermine economic growth. His political movement cannot survive that.
Trump has bet everything on the economy. He won the presidency on rising food prices. Despite low inflation, grocery prices will remain high, and his tariffs threaten to send prices of some items soaring again. Voters in swing states will notice if the cost of imported coffee, fruit, sugar, and soap skyrockets. Trump needs to fuel some economic growth to prevent the MAGA project from dying in 2028.
Silicon Valley is the answer.
Big tech is arguably America’s most successful export. Walk down the street in almost any country and you’ll see people using Google on their Android phones. Those who don’t use Android have iPhones. Countless millions use WhatsApp, part of Meta. They have Windows computers where they can browse American websites using Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Everywhere you look, in the far corners of the planet, people are buying and using products from big American tech companies. Trump should be leaning toward Silicon Valley, not avoiding it.
The second Trump administration already has something of a “tech bro” image. J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy are all closely associated with a certain kind of Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Trump has drawn endorsements from across the world of venture capital and cryptocurrency, from Marc Andreessen to the Winklevoss twins.
Whether Trump’s brand of tech will ultimately benefit Silicon Valley is up for debate, though. Earlier this year, Vance praised Lina Khan, the chair of Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, who has spent her time in office launching her own devastating lawsuits aimed at breaking up successful American companies like Amazon.
It is in Trump’s interest to seize the antitrust narrative early on, rather than delaying things down the road. Interventionists like Khan, who denounce successful American enterprises and see new regulation as a solution to all of society’s ills, will not hide for the next four years. If anything, their voices will be louder now that they are outside the tent.
The Overton antitrust window is rapidly sliding toward greater state intervention in the marketplace. Jonathan Haidt has become a leading thinker on tech panic in recent years. In a recent Wired op-ed, he likened technology to alcohol, arguing that regulators should ban people under 21 from much of the internet.
“The idea that parents alone should manage their children’s access to alcohol would have seemed absurd to most people,” he writes. “Likewise, it will soon seem absurd that we allowed children of any age to go anywhere adults go on the internet.”
Besides the obvious fact that regulations designed to restrict internet access rarely work—children know their IP addresses through VPNs and can easily circumvent restrictions—this kind of thinking reflects European-style centrism, where economic growth is secondary to safety concerns. For Trump to align his administration with this anti-tech mindset would be both absurd and self-defeating.
To follow through on his promises to voters of growth and prosperity, Trump should make sure to protect and promote America’s most successful industry. That starts with cutting the spider’s web, where bureaucracy enthusiasts try to use antitrust as a means to vastly increase the size of the state. It also means getting rid of outgoing Attorney General Biden’s ludicrous proposal to blow up Google.
Beyond the rejection of these extreme proposals by Silicon Valley’s enemies, it would take little effort on Trump’s part to make Big Tech’s success his own. While the rest of the world is sinking into a bottomless pit of regulatory turmoil, he can sit back and watch investment flood into the U.S. economy and a handful of tech companies continue to send the S&P 500 soaring.
This is the wonder of the free market: It works best when the government does the least. Breaking up Google would take an enormous amount of time and energy. The best the 78-year-old president-elect can do for the economy and the future of his movement is nothing.
Jason Reed is a political analyst and commentator who has contributed to more than 100 major media outlets in 15 countries. He is the spokesperson and project director for Young Voices, a nonprofit organization.
