Joe Nocera, Columnist

For Deals Like Disney-Fox, It Helps to Be a Trump Friend

The antitrust approval process isn’t supposed to work like this.

June 28, 2018 at 2:12 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

Buddies.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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If I were a cynical man, I would view Wednesday’s approval of the Walt Disney Co.-21st Century Fox Inc. deal by the Justice Department as further evidence of the weaponization of the antitrust division under President Donald Trump. This is not a good turn of events.

First came the division’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger — opposition that developed soon after Makan Delrahim was named by Trump to be his antitrust head. As an academic, you’ll recall, Delrahim was on record as saying that the proposed merger wasn’t problematic. What’s more, so-called vertical mergers — that is, mergers in which the two companies don’t have overlapping businesses, as was the case with AT&T-Time Warner — hadn’t been challenged in court in over 40 years.