This January, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Meta, unexpectedly announced that the company would change its content moderation policies in response to conservatives’ claims of censorship. It would also, the company later said, end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Zuckerberg never explicitly admitted these decisions were meant to curry favor with the Trump Administration in hopes that it might abandon antitrust enforcement actions (some of which were initiated in the first Trump Administration) that threaten Meta’s data-driven surveillance business models. Still, one can safely assume his change of heart has everything to do with gaining influence. Zuckerberg, after all, also visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago shortly after his election, and he made a $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration fund. At the inauguration, in what will be a picture for the ages, Zuckerberg—along with his fellow oligarchs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai of Google—stood right behind Trump and J.D. Vance as they took their oaths of office. The fusion between government and the oligarchs appeared to be complete.

In 2016, Trump claimed he would “drain the swamp” and tapped into America’s longstanding economic frustrations—frustrations he linked to many establishment politicians in both parties who embody the type of pay-to-play politics that large corporations like Meta deploy, a system that keeps Americans sicker, poorer, and more unhappy than overall economic statistics would suggest. The Biden Administration, in turn, seemed to take these lessons from 2016 to heart—at least some of the time. It adopted a model of economic governance that turned the page on older models of free trade and corporate consolidation. Industrial policy was in, and NAFTA-style agreements were out. But just as regularly, the Biden Administration, and then Kamala Harris’s campaign, catered to the interests of big business over the working class.

The Biden Administration’s governance model exposed a decades-old tension between two competing economic visions within the Democratic Party. One seeks to reinvigorate American manufacturing, strengthen unions, and challenge monopoly power through regulatory action. The other looks to maintain and strengthen the party’s ties to corporate America and Wall Street. The unifying glue of fear of Trump, it was thought, would hold this incoherent and less-than-sturdy alliance together in 2024. Harris’s loss should put such delusions to rest.

Democrats need to make a decision. They can either continue their decades-long accommodation of billionaires and corporate interests or embrace a genuine populist agenda that directly challenges concentrated economic power. It is not possible to govern as the champion of both working people and oligarchs. As Pennsylvania Representative Chris Deluzio put it, there isn’t a “win-win” when it comes to the interests of big corporations and working people.

If Democrats make the clear choice that they will govern to serve working people, not oligarchs and their monopolies, then the good news is that they have an effective playbook from the Biden era to follow. Although anti-monopolists were a very small part of the Biden Administration—the combined budget controlled by three of the anti-monopoly movement’s most impactful Biden appointees, highlighted below, was around $1.5 billion—they were successful in challenging powerful economic interests and garnered widespread support for many of their actions. This must be the model for the future of Democratic politics and governance.

Learning from Anti-Monopoly Leaders

The anti-monopoly movement came together as a response to the 2007-08 financial crisis and the mistakes the Obama Administration made in handling it. Opting for short-term stability over systemic change, Obama-era regulators let major banks off the hook for their criminal behavior despite widespread outrage from across the political spectrum. At the same time, the Obama Administration closely aligned itself with Silicon Valley giants, naively believing the industry’s PR that these gigantic corporations would usher in an era of free speech, worldwide democratization, and increased economic opportunity. The result was the world we live in now: fragile economic stability combined with increased political instability. Corporate concentration, where a small number of corporations control the market, is at record highs, with increasingly extractive tech giants, too-big-to-fail banks, and too-big-to-care health conglomerates dominating every aspect of our lives.

Anti-monopoly leaders like Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, and Jonathan Kanter entered the Biden Administration with a clear vision and an execution plan for combatting this reality. They kept up a relentless pace from their first to their last days, using every lever available to them to challenge big business.

The trio took on some of the most brutal fights of the Biden Administration. As chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Khan used the full scope of the commission’s authorities to tackle several pernicious issues that harm workers, small businesses, and consumers. The Khan-era FTC successfully blocked the merger of supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons, which would almost certainly have resulted in higher grocery prices. It used its rulemaking authority to take on noncompete employment contracts that trapped Americans in their jobs, and its Section 5 authority to put a stop to anti-competitive business practices by powerful corporations. After the FTC warned pharmaceutical companies about improper patent listings in the Food and Drug Administration’s “Orange Book,” several companies delisted bogus patents, bringing down the cost of some name-brand inhalers from over $500 to just $35.

As director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Chopra—who coined the term “junk fees”—cracked down on banks that were taking financial advantage of their customers, capped highly unpopular nonsense credit card fees and overdraft fees, took medical debt off of credit reports, regulated buy now-pay later schemes, and established new rules to regulate Big Tech companies moving into the digital payments space.

In addition, Khan and Kanter, Biden’s assistant attorney general for antitrust, reinvigorated antitrust enforcement after 40 years of inaction. They filed an unprecedented number of merger challenges, bringing more than four times as many billion-dollar merger cases to trial as either the Trump-Pence or Obama-Biden Administrations did. They brought cases against some of the most notorious monopolies in the United States: Google, Apple, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, Amazon, Meta, Visa, and the real estate software company RealPage. Under Kanter, the Justice Department (DOJ) in its lawsuit against Google won the first major monopolization case in two decades. And as Americans experienced the first significant inflation wave in decades, the anti-monopolists were on the case. Khan’s FTC blocked the Kroger-Albertsons merger, while the DOJ successfully stopped anti-competitive mergers in the airline industry, where prices have also risen dramatically.

Big business and their allies were livid. The anti-monopolists had an uphill battle taking on corporations with unlimited resources that questioned their authority in the corporate-friendly courts and poured millions of dollars into PR campaigns and lobbying members of Congress. Washington elites and billionaires criticized them for “going too far,” claiming—falsely—that they were damaging the economic prospects of Americans. All three faced relentless attacks—Khan to such an extent that my organization, the American Economic Liberties Project, began tracking The Wall Street Journal opinion section’s obsession with the FTC chair. The Silicon Valley billionaires backing Harris in the presidential election said publicly and repeatedly that they would like to see her fire Khan. None of this stopped her, Chopra, or Kanter.

The anti-monopolists, however, didn’t simply take action. They proactively engaged the public and told a story of who they were fighting, why they were doing so, and what they would do to fix things. Chopra, Khan, and Kanter pointed a finger directly at the companies, the CEOs, and the bankers responsible for many Americans’ daily struggles. They built popular support for their actions by communicating with the public and seeking input from a wide range of stakeholders. Khan, for example, democratized the agency’s work by opening it up to the public with a novel yet simple idea—monthly open commission meetings. And she, along with Chopra and Kanter, got out of Washington to meet with workers and small business owners. They encountered receptive audiences, with pharmacists, grocers, physicians, taxi drivers, workers, farmers, musicians, and consumers all flocking to their events and submitting tens of thousands of comments to their agencies. This enthusiastic public response confirmed what polls have consistently found: that a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents support enforcers cracking down on greedy corporations.

Contrast the anti-monopolists’ record with that of the Biden-era Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Even as Americans suffered from a combination of skyrocketing out-of-pocket health-care costs, out-of-control insurance company denials, and increasing difficulties accessing quality care, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra did little to use the authority at his disposal to address any of the growing discontent with America’s health-care industrial complex. Becerra, whose role gave him control of around a quarter of the federal government’s budget, refused to take on dominant health-care corporations. Instead, it was Khan’s FTC that aggressively challenged pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), those middlemen who drive up drug costs by weaponizing the rebate system and profiting off kickbacks. The FTC filed a lawsuit against the three largest PBMs—CVS Health’s Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx—in September 2024. Becerra could have fixed this problem with a simple rule banning kickbacks, but he chose not to take action.

This muddled approach to governing played out over and over again throughout the Biden Administration. While Chopra took on powerful banks, the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency both dragged their feet on deciding whether to block a mega-merger between Capital One and Discover, paving the way for more bank consolidation, increasing financial stability risks, and higher fees for consumers. The Biden anti-monopoly enforcers brought cases against Big Tech while Senator Chuck Schumer refused to bring antitrust legislation to the floor of the Senate and invited Silicon Valley to craft artificial intelligence legislation. As inflation surged, Biden enforcers went after grocery giants, meatpacking monopolies, and corporate landlords to bring down prices. Still, the Federal Reserve—headed by Jay Powell, who was initially appointed by Trump and reappointed by Biden—maintained high interest rates that financially crushed American households. It is little wonder that voters felt worse off at the end of Biden’s term, despite all the macro statistics indicating a strong economy, and were unwilling to give Democrats another four years to govern.

Looking Ahead

Donald Trump has won the presidency twice by claiming to be a man of action against the establishment and elites. However, Trump will not be able to balance the economic populism that he campaigned on with the priorities of his billionaire-filled circle of advisers and Cabinet members. Many of these Cabinet heads and advisers, like Musk, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, seem laser-focused on dismantling any checks on corporate power. Consequently, many of the accomplishments of the Biden enforcers may not make it through the Trump Administration. Big Tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos want the antitrust cases going to trial in 2025 and beyond to go away because they recognize that antitrust is the real challenge to their economic power. Republicans in Congress have already declared their intention to overturn popular CFPB rules on overdraft fees. New FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson in his first week quietly shut down five open public comment dockets where Americans could share their stories on issues like surveillance pricing. And on February 8, Vought, whom Trump appointed acting CFPB director after firing Chopra, moved to halt all work the CFPB was doing to protect consumers, effectively removing the cop on the beat. The move to defang the CFPB is legally questionable, but it’s a gift to tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and Musk who are seeking to expand their monopoly power into finance.

Defending and building on the progress the anti-monopolists made provides an opportunity for Democrats to define themselves as the champions of working- and middle-class Americans against the oligarchs. The many upcoming battles—not just over the breadth of corporate power, but also over the wealth and influence of the 1 percent and oligarch class—will offer opportunities to declare a principled opposition to powerful corporations, condemn their lawbreaking, and defend the best parts of Biden’s legacy. This is not simply about messaging and calling out Trump and other Republicans on their hypocrisy. On the federal level, there may be opportunities to work, on an issue-by-issue basis, with Republicans who understand the challenge of monopoly power, for example, to reduce drug prices and support independent pharmacies by breaking the power of PBMs. Meanwhile, the states are also a major venue for action. Many antimonopoly policies, like bans on noncompete agreements, junk fees, and algorithmic price-fixing in rental housing, are already being championed by legislators in states such as Minnesota, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Some have even passed into law. Even New York Governor Kathy Hochul, hardly a populist, appears to have seen the political upside of taking on the oligarchy: She recently announced her support for two measures to prevent large corporations and Wall Street financiers from driving up the cost of housing.

Democrats should also consider the case of Biden-era Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who, after multiple airline meltdowns in 2022, took a lesson from the anti-monopolists and began to push back hard against the powerful airline industry. He imposed record fines and instituted meaningful consumer protections like the automatic refund rule, which guarantees customers refunds from airlines for cancelled and significantly delayed flights. Lo and behold, both airline performance and passenger experience improved. His example shows that there is a path forward for Democrats—if they choose to take it.

Economic populism is not just about a niche area of law like antitrust. It is a political approach to thinking about the power big business and oligarchs like Elon Musk hold over our daily lives and finances, and to tackling that power through policy and the law to ensure it is dispersed away from corporations and billionaires to workers, consumers, and honest businesses. Polls show that it appeals to large majorities of Americans, particularly in swing states. The proof is in the Democrats who survived and thrived in the red wave of 2024—Democratic House members like Chris Deluzio, Josh Riley, and Pat Ryan who ran on challenging corporate power in purple and red districts and won.

This means the Democrats need to do more than talk a good game. Winning back voters’ trust means taking on powerful corporations publicly. It will require the party to confront its corporate donors, along with the pols and experts who do their bidding. It may also mean working strategically with populists on the right when there is a common cause on material economic issues, in the way that Senator Bernie Sanders has partnered up with Senator Josh Hawley to push legislation that would cap credit card interest rates.

If—and likely when—the Trump Administration fails to deliver on its populist promises, the Democratic Party needs to have a vision for what should have been done instead and to be able to explain to voters how that would have been better. Then, they need to stick to that vision the next time they are at the levers of power. Following the playbook of populist leaders like Khan, Chopra, and Kanter is a good place to start. This is the fight ahead for the Democratic Party. It would be a mistake to characterize this as a fight against Trump: It’s a battle against the oligarchs who have found their way into the politics and presidential administrations of both parties. There is no middle ground.