On Monday, Trump's DOJ announced that it would sue to prevent the "vertical merger" between AT&T, a content distributor, and Time Warner, a content provider and the company that owns CNN. It was a strange decision by an administration that has so far been unflappably friendly toward big business. It contradicts a move by the FCC last week, which made it easier for local-market media companies to consolidate by doing away with dated ownership restrictions. What's more, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted, this is the first effort by the Justice Department to sue to block a vertical merger since 1977's United States v. Hammermill Paper Co., which the government lost.

In a recent interview predating the DOJ's announcement, the Trump administration's top antitrust regulator, Makan Delrahim, insisted that politics must not interfere with enforcement matters. "That would be antithetical to everything I've stood for," he said, adding that the government could risk upsetting the marketplace by issuing abrupt changes to standing U.S. antitrust legal theory. Usually, the government seeks an out-of-court settlement that would mitigate a vertical deal's potentially negative consequences for consumers and competitors. Not in this case. For Trump, this deal must not go through.

He said as much himself. "I'm not going to get involved in litigation," Trump declared before promptly involving himself in litigation. "Personally," he added in the same breath, "I've always felt that was a deal that's not good for the country." Delrahim has since changed his tune on the potential threat to the marketplace posed by abrupt and seemingly arbitrary shifts in its antitrust theory. "[T]here is an instinctive reaction to big business these days," Delrahim said in the interview he now insists was taken out of context. "There are people who think big is just bad." Yes, those people are called liberals.

In January, a group of 13 Democratic senators signed a letter indicating that they were skeptical of how an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "serve the public interest." Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Cory Booker, and others demanded that these two companies demonstrate how their joining would benefit consumers and serve the "broader policy goals of the Communications Act."