MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: The Rot Runs Deep, Very Deep

By Marc C. Johnson

It’s really tough to manage in a rational brain so many scandals and so much chaos at the same time.

I mean we have the FBI director, the president’s son-in-law, Pete Kegseth, the big beautiful ballroom, dismissal of charges against the punks that actually had a plan to overturn the 2020 election, etc. etc.

As historian Garrett Graff wrote Monday April 20, 2026:

Washington can only pay attention to a scandal or two at a time — add in a headline-grabbing crisis, whether it’s ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, and now two months of war with Iran that have spiraled into the greatest energy disruption in history — and there are all sorts of should-be-big-deal scandals that don’t get the oxygen or sustained media focus that they should.

Times columnist Thomas Edsall says:

Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.

Or last week …

One of the scandals Garrett Graff mentioned as being difficult to keep track of suddenly – like BOOM – re-entered the public dialogue late yesterday.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was abruptly dumped.

We hardly knew her.

Chavez-DeRemer, among other things, apparently told her staff to make sure she always had the vino necessary to do her job.

Chavez-DeRemer was a remarkably insignificant and wildly incompetent selection to head the Labor Department in the first place, but the GOP Senate rubber stamped her nomination because, well, Donald Trump thought she was up to the job, and the Republican Senate has disappeared into little more than a performative platform where angry old white guys go to get on cable TV.

But, truly – isn’t Trump good at this personnel stuff?

This is his third Cabinet member to go in a little over a month. There will be more. The betting markets have several favorites with Pete Hegseth and Howard Lutnick currently neck and neck.

Well, at least the former Secretary of Labor now has more time to spend with her wine refrigerator, if not her husband.

Here’s CNN on the Labor Department “resignation”:

For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team, as well as other allegations of inappropriate behavior, such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel, according to a Department of Labor source with knowledge of the situation.

For example, Chavez-DeRemer had expressed a desire to go to events such as a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states, and asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events, the source said.

Let’s just say Chavez-DeRemer was not exactly Frances Perkins. You can Google that, and doing so may make you think that at once upon time in the distant past Cabinet secretaries were, well, serious, competent people who actually deal real things.

But I digress. There are other scandals out there, my friends.

Case in point.

Enforcement of antitrust laws may cause your eyes to glaze over, but it is kind of a big deal in the big picture of how big and ever bigger businesses operate in our late stage capitalist world.

Trump recently fired the woman – it’s always women – who actually knows something about antitrust law. You might have missed it.

We should pay attention.

Anatomy of a nomination

On February 12, 2025, Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson entered, what for a House member is, often unfriendly territory. Simpson visited the Senate that day on a mission that he clearly enjoyed.

“It was a true honor to introduce my friend Gail Slater before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for her confirmation as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust,” Simpson wrote later in social media. “President Trump made a very smart choice — the right choice, in nominating Gail for this position.”

The congressman lavished praise on the president’s nominee underscoring that he had known Gail Slater for years, they had eaten at each other’s table and that she was an immensely qualified professional.

Slater is the wife of Simpson’s former longtime chief of staff, Lindsay Slater, the staffer widely credited for Simpson’s most important legislative success in 2015, wilderness designations in central Idaho, including the Cecil D. Andrus Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness.

Gail Slater, before entering Trump’s orbit, was a policy adviser to then-Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and before that had a top policy position with Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, and before that, worked at the Federal Trade Commission.

“In these roles, she learned the nuts and bolts of antitrust enforcement,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said during Senate consideration of Slater’s nomination. Grassley stressed the bipartisan support the appointment engendered, including a letter from former antitrust division chiefs under Republican and Democratic presidents.

“The antitrust division will flourish under Ms. Slater’s strong leadership, and I’m proud to support her,” Grassley said before the Senate voted 78-19 to confirm the nominee with family ties to Idaho. That’s as close to a bipartisan endorsement as is possible in today’s starkly divided Senate. Every Republican including Idaho’s two senators, Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, voted for Slater.

Then the reality of Trumpworld descended.

Almost exactly a year to the day after Simpson’s introduction of Gail Slater, she was gone, fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi, two months before she would be fired herself.

The firing, like most things in the Trump administration, was abrupt and without explanation. Slater said only she was leaving with “great sadness and abiding hope … It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role.”

News organizations were left to speculate why the imminently qualified Slater had been canned.

The Guardian, citing unnamed sources, said Slater lost support from her former boss, now Vice President JD Vance, while Fox News said Trump wanted Slater gone because she hadn’t been aggressive enough advancing affordability efforts. This is the same Trump, of course, who has spiked world oil and American gasoline, fertilizer and natural gas prices with a war against Iran that he can’t explain and struggles to end.

The more likely explanation for turnover in the Antitrust Division — Slater is only one of several senior Justice Department officials to depart — is that the Trump administration really doesn’t care about enforcing anti-trust laws. Trump personally picks the corporate winners he want to win, as he did by publicly putting his tiny thumb on the scale in favor of Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. ¹

News last week that United Airlines was exploring a merger with American Airlines contained another important clue of just how unserious the administration is about protecting the public interest versus the corporate and pro-Trump interest.

As Reuter’s reported last week:

“United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby pitched a potential merger of the two carriers to U.S. President Donald Trump in late February, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but industry officials were quick to highlight the formidable antitrust obstacles such a deal would face.”

For whatever reason American Airlines soon put the kibosh on any merger, but the fact that United’s CEO floated the idea with the president is a big tell.

If Trump wants a deal to happen, his Justice Department, sans an antitrust chief actually committed to enforcing the law, would greenlight any merger, particularly if a company doing a deal hires the right lobbyist or makes a well-timed corporate donation to build a White House ballroom or a triumphal arch.

Two attorneys at the national law firm Snell and Wilmer wrote recently that Slater’s

“departure signals a new era of selective federal antitrust enforcement. As federal enforcement priorities shift, state attorneys general are stepping into the vacuum. For companies navigating antitrust risk, the enforcement landscape is fragmenting — and becoming far less predictable.”

The key words there are “selective federal antitrust enforcement,” or more precisely selective enforcement based on the president’s friends and enemies.

One of those friends is well-connected MAGA friendly lobbyist Mike Davis, who was hired by Hewlett-Packard to help ensure the that the Justice Department approved the company’s $14 billion deal in 2025 with Juniper Networks. DOJ’s antitrust division under Slater initially indicated its opposition to the deal and Davis, according to the Wall Street Journal, resorted to threats.

“If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ,” Davis is reported to have told Slater, an account contained in a sworn statement from one of Slater’s top deputies, who has also been fired.

By the Journal’s account, Davis just went over Slater’s head for approval, while demanding repeatedly on his social media feeds that she should be fired.

Two month later, DOJ approved the HP deal, apparently after Slater was told she’d lose her job if she objected. She lost her job anyway, and we may never know the full story as to why. Shortly after Slater’s termination, the administration handed Live Nation, the ticket monopoly, a separate sweetheart deal. ²

Filling the swamp

This is the real “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain, a cozy world of billionaire CEOs, sleazy lobbyists and corrupt executive branch officials who are making a killing dismantling the law and regulations, many in place for decades, that attempt to balance a capitalist free market with the broad public interest that never benefits from excessive concentration of economic power.

At least Sen. Grassley had the guts to express some dismay at Gail Slater’s defenestration.

“Sorry to see her leave,” Grassley said, in praising her populist approach to protecting consumers.

By contrast, the silence of the lambs fell over the Idaho delegation, and particularly Congressman Simpson.

Simpson learned long ago that no one is safe in a political party where expertise and independent thought are never tolerated. Gail Slater learned that lesson the hard way.

Simpson’s great and talented friend was fired for trying to enforce the law.

Simpson said not a word.

Many of these “deals” are now in court in actions advanced by state attorneys generals. Congressional Democrats have tried to get information about the real decision making process at DOJ, without much success.

And the corruption continues unabated.

The Curse

I began this piece with a quote from the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who long ago wrote a little book titled The Curse of Bigness.

Brandeis spent much of legal career before joining the Supreme Court as an opponent of monopoly, or as he simplified it – bigness.

Here’s Christopher Ketcham on the essence of the Brandeis view:

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

Want to bet that Donald J. Trump has never heard of Mr. Justice Brandeis?

Epilogue

In a classic insider DC story at the time Gail Slater was appointed as assistant attorney general for antitrust, POLITICO suggested that her appointment was a test of how serious MAGA world was about antitrust enforcement, particularly against Big Tech companies.

Reading the story more than a year later takes you back to a fantasyland where Donald Trump was surely going to be a rational, policy oriented president.

How’s that working?

The most interesting quote in the POLITICO piece was this:

“I think a big challenge for Gail is, how impulsive will the president be?” says William Kovacic, a former chairman of the FTC, appointed by then-President George W. Bush and who says he’s heartened to have Slater — with whom he worked at the FTC more than a decade ago — in her new post. “You can’t say, ‘My god, shut up,’ because then you’re fired. So you cross your fingers and hope you’re not a target.”

As Slater’s Senate confirmation hearing she was asked by Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin:

… how she would respond if Trump asked her to bring an enforcement action against a firm out of retaliation, his political interests or personal grudge. “I do not expect that President Trump would make such a request,” Slater responded.