Trump’s Lax Approach to Antitrust Helps Spur Banner Year for Corporate Mergers

This article was originally published in Common Dreams under Creative Commons 3.0 license. Read the original article. Contact: editor@commondreams.org

By Brad Reed

Global corporate mergers surged to near-record highs in 2025, driven in part by US President Donald Trump’s lax approach to antitrust enforcement.

The Financial Times reported on Friday that global dealmaking in 2025 topped $4 trillion, including 68 mergers worth $10 billion or more, highlighted by Netflix’s $72 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and a proposed $85 billion mega-merger between railway giants Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern.

The US alone accounted for $2.3 trillion worth of mergers and acquisitions, which the Financial Times said highlighted the Trump administration’s role in green-lighting corporate consolidation.

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“Top dealmakers said that the Trump administration’s push to loosen regulation had encouraged companies to explore tie-ups that they might otherwise have been hesitant to pursue,” the Financial Times explained.

Andrew Nussbaum, co-chair of the executive committee at law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, told the Financial Times that corporate leaders “see a willingness of the regulators to engage in constructive dialogue” under the second Trump administration, which has given them “a willingness to take on regulatory risk for transactions that are strategic.”

The American Economic Liberties Project has also taken note of the Trump administration’s role in shepherding through big mergers, and created a Trump Merger Boom tracker earlier this year to document the massive wave of corporate consolidation.

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In its analysis of the administration’s lax approach to antitrust enforcement, the American Economic Liberties Project said that “Trump’s new antitrust enforcers have demonstrated a willingness to facilitate dealmaking through an uptick in early terminations and settlements.”

“Despite pro-enforcement rhetoric early on from Trump’s heads of the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division,” the American Economic Liberties Project added, “it’s becoming increasingly clear that agency leadership is having trouble making their decisions in a vacuum—with a quiet tide of deals granted to companies that have been friendly to the White House.”

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