BUTLER, Pa. — Democratic billionaires can’t stand her. Republican members of Congress can’t stop investigating her.
But President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan may find herself some new and strange bedfellows in a Trump-Vance administration. The lower half of the ticket said so himself, floating a possible role for Khan working alongside an even more controversial figure: billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk.
Speaking to The Post, vice-presidential nominee JD Vance considered the possibility of the two policy lightning rods serving in the would-be Trump White House next year, working to crack down on Big Tech censorship.
Vance answered to the backdrop of opera filling the air at Donald Trump’s triumphant return to Butler, Pa.
“I agree with them both on some issues. I disagree with them both on some issues,” he began, appearing amused by the question.
“What unites the Republican ticket is a sense that we just got to get back to common sense, and it’s okay to disagree with each other,” Vance continued, mentioning Trump supporters with a variety of worldviews: ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard along with Republicans such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
“You can have strong disagreements on issues. We want to facilitate that disagreement because we believe the best idea will rise to the top.”
But what hasn’t united Republicans historically is an affinity for antitrust, which sets Vance apart.
In recent days, several Republican committee chairs in the House have accused Khan of overstepping her antitrust powers, wasting taxpayer dollars and campaigning with Democrats.
The GOP has long been the party of business, but Vance is leading a new conservative vanguard aiming to check corporate power, especially Big Tech.
These “Khan-servatives,” who include Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, support the FTC chair’s work to challenge monopolies and expand the scope of US antitrust powers. They want to go beyond keeping prices low for consumers — they also see the FTC’s mission as promoting competition and innovation.
With election integrity top of mind for some Republican voters, Vance wants to crack down on Big Tech censorship he believes silences conservatives — and Khan could be his secret weapon to do just that.
“I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said in February at an antitrust conference.
Building on Trump-era antitrust probes into Big Tech, Khan’s FTC has sued Amazon for squeezing sellers and favoring its own services on its marketplace and Meta for buying up would-be social media competitors Instagram and WhatsApp.
Vance, formerly a venture capitalist, shares Khan’s vision to break up behemoth tech companies he says stifle smaller rivals.
“She’s justifiably worried about some of the big technology companies and the concentration of power,” Vance said this summer before lauding Khan for not using the agency to advance a woke agenda.
Vance’s views are music to the ears of some “little tech” companies and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, especially his former employer billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who helped bankroll the Ohio senator’s political rise.
Vance repeated calls to break up Google in August when he urged Thiel, co-founder of online-payments system PayPal and data-analytics group Palantir, to “get off the sidelines” and donate to the Trump campaign.
Vance, a conservative, also wants antitrust power to crack down on Big Tech censorship.
“Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up,” Vance tweeted in February, “This matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”
Vance has also criticized Section 230, part of a statute he says protects social media companies from lawsuits if they remove third-party posts “for having the wrong political views.”
That’s where Elon Musk comes in. He lauded Trump’s pick of Vance, promised to commit $45 million to the Trump-supporting America PAC and stumped for the former president for the first time this month in Butler.
“Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote? You must have free speech in order to have democracy,” Musk said to tens of thousands in Butler.
Though Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, he has suspended the accounts of journalists and throttled links to media competitors. Khan rebuffed a meeting with Musk as the FTC investigates Twitter’s data practices.
Still, the billionaire’s avowed free-speech absolutism aligns him with the third of conservatives who say their First Amendment rights are “not at all” secure.
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Congress the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID content, saying he regretted suppressing The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which exposed the president’s son using his father to rake in business deals.
Vance has repeatedly blamed social media censorship of that story when asked if Trump lost the 2020 election. And he notes the vice president is on board with that kind of behavior.
“Kamala Harris is really into censorship because she fundamentally doesn’t believe in the right of Americans to speak their mind and to say what they believe,” he told The Post. “The biggest threat to democracy in 2024 is Kamala Harris’ weird obsession with censorship.”
Harris, meanwhile, is under some pressure to back off Big Tech.
Last week, Harris surrogate and billionaire investor Mark Cuban said she should leave Khan out of a future Democratic administration, just as Biden’s Department of Justice considers breaking up Google’s search-engine monopoly.
“By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told Semafor.
Two Democratic billionaire donors previously pushed Harris to sack Khan, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who sits on Microsoft’s board.
Khan’s FTC is investigating Microsoft’s AI deals and $13 billion investment in OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT bot. The probe is part of the federal government’s strategy to preserve competition in the emerging technology field that could transform American society.
Despite her disfavor with the donor class, Khan still has some supporters.
A number of tech executives backed Khan at a recent “Little Tech for Harris” fundraiser in San Francisco with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as the headliner.
Progressive lawmakers have also come to the antitrust chief’s defense.
“Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last week.
But if anyone does come for Khan, she might find a home in the most unlikeliest of places: a Trump-Vance White House.
