Today, another of Donald Trump’s populist pledges was thrown out the window. The President’s Department of Justice reached a surprise settlement with entertainment company Live Nation over its alleged monopolistic practices in the live events and ticketing market. The issue is a contentious one amid a wider affordability crisis, with many consumers enraged by large and unaccountable fees, as well as tech issues, since Live Nation’s 2010 merger with rival Ticketmaster to achieve nearly 90% market dominance.

In practice, this dominance has resulted in obscene fees, including $1,000 tickets for Taylor Swift concerts, with the final prices often bloated by Live Nation charges of up to 20%. And with the DoJ settlement, the firm can continue to charge those fees while paying a fine that amounts to a minuscule share of revenues.

Trump and his advisers long recognized the issue’s political resonance: GOP voters are often the parents of kids who attend live shows. Hence the President’s March 2025 vow to “protect fans from exploitative ticket scalping and bring common-sense reforms to America’s live-entertainment-ticketing industry”. He subsequently turned that promise into an executive order directing the DoJ and FTC to “ensure that competition laws are appropriately enforced in the concert and entertainment industry”. And his DoJ accordingly picked up the antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation which had been launched by the Biden administration. By all accounts, the Trumpians were pursuing the case diligently — until, suddenly, they weren’t.

What happened in the interval was a quiet putsch inside the DoJ that saw the sidelining and eventual ouster of the department’s populist, JD Vance-aligned antitrust chief, Gail Slater. The troubling signs appeared last summer, when, as UnHerd first reported, Trump-connected lobbyists hashed out a different settlement with DoJ higher-ups in a literal backroom deal over cocktails — sidestepping Slater’s team. A pair of Slater deputies were fired — officially for “insubordination”, though insiders told UnHerd it was because they objected to both the terms of the deal and the shady manner in which it was reportedly reached.

Then, last month, the DoJ fired Slater — a move widely seen as a triumph for Trump-supporting lobbyists who charge seven-figure fees in exchange for marshaling cases out of trial and into favorable settlement terms.

The Live Nation deal — pushed by, among others, Trump I-era consigliere Kellyanne Conway — fits the pattern. The deal preserves the behemoth formed by the merger, while failing to curb its power to slap huge, unaccountable fees on top of ticket prices. Live Nation “needed to be chastened,” the antitrust activist Matt Stoller told UnHerd, and this deal does little to curb that.

That’s another missed opportunity for the administration to deliver actually existing populism. As one insider, who spoke anonymously owing to their proximity to the case, told UnHerd: “The President issued an executive order directing his DoJ to restore competition in the live-entertainment marketplace. This settlement falls way short of the mark and undermines what should be a robust domestic policy affordability agenda heading into the midterms.”

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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