Gail Slater is a principle, conservative antitrust hawk
President Donald Trump made one of the best and most consequential decisions of his second term: tapping technology lawyer Gail Slater to lead the Antitrust Division of his Justice Department.
Chances are, you have never heard of Slater. But the lawyers, lobbyists, and woke billionaires of America’s largest tech firms all have. Rest assured that within minutes of Slater’s nomination, Silicon Valley flew into panicked Slack chats, Zoom calls, and emergency meetings.
Big Tech’s big hope for 2025 — that for all Trump’s populist rhetoric, a Republican president would never really challenge Big Business — was dashed. After years of consumer abuse, market manipulation, and political treachery, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and the nation’s other tech giants will finally face their reckoning.
Gail Slater is that reckoning.
For Slater is not just an expert in competition and antitrust law, thoroughly qualified to lead the Division. Nor is she just an accomplished lawyer with experience in private practice and two branches of government. No, what makes Slater’s resumé stand out — and what gut-punches the Big Tech execs — is that she worked for years behind the Silicon Curtain. She has held senior positions at major technology and telecom firms, and even the internet industry’s trade association.
Slater emerged from these experiences — behind enemy lines, as it were — as the most knowledgeable, principled conservative antitrust hawk in Washington.
She is one of the few in right-wing antitrust circles who understands what the antitrust statutes are for: not irritating roadblocks for business to weave and dodge around, but integral components of upholding a fair and robust free market, one where both large and small entrants can compete on their merits and thrive.
While some industry-funded policy groups in Washington are being paid by Silicon Valley to conflate her with the populist left, Slater’s ideology is distinct. Her approach to antitrust law is not values based, nor is it too laden in favor of speculative economic jargon.
Rather, Slater continues the tradition of John Sherman, the pro-Lincoln, anti-slavery Republican from Ohio who lent his name to the nation’s founding antitrust statute: a skepticism toward centralized power, both in the government and outside of it, and a goal of keeping the market open to all comers, not just those who can buy their way through the government’s labyrinth of rules, regulations, and regulators.
