The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

Anyone who works in government has a favorite metaphor for major policy change. Some talk about glaciers being redirected; I prefer the image of turning a battleship. The point is that it isn’t easy and may not happen at all, but if it does, the effects are lasting and hard to undo.

As Joe Biden reaches the end of his presidency, there is one area where he undeniably turned the battleship: American antitrust law and policy, also known as anti-monopoly. Having spent two years working on the project within the White House, I concede some bias. But whatever else may be remembered or forgotten about the past four years, Biden’s antitrust achievements mark a decisive moment in the history of the American anti-monopoly movement, and by extension, the nature of American capitalism.

Once a major part of American economic and political life (the 1912 presidential election centered on it), by the 21st century, antitrust law had shrunk to a shadow of its former self: a  cautious regime, rarely enforced. Coming into office four years ago, Biden saw many reasons to undertake a major reboot. The main reason was the simplest: The problems that antitrust laws were originally intended to remedy—economic imbalance, lasting market power, growing divides between rich and poor—were glaringly obvious.

The warning signs were in fact already flashing by the mid-2010s, when Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers began documenting the twin problems of economic concentration and rising inequality. At the street level, Americans were (and remain) unhappy about things such as rising drug costs, the price of essential services, and other symptoms of an economy in which so many industries—hospitals, cable providers, airlines—had consolidated, in much of the country, into just a few firms. The surprise success of the 2016 Trump campaign was, in part, a manifestation of the public’s anger at the unfairness of the modern economy.

These are all issues that the antitrust laws were enacted to address. The goal of antitrust has never been to replace capitalism but to save it from itself—to promote the kind of free-market economy that serves as a decentralized and balanced engine of wealth creation. 
 
In early 2021, Biden agreed with White House staff that bold reforms were needed to complete that turn in policy begun during the later Obama administration. The president wanted to define it as a pivot away from the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, whose administration, under the influence of the legal scholar and judge Robert Bork, entrenched an approach to antitrust that largely involved ignoring the laws as written in favor of promoting a pro-corporate version of “efficiency.” As Biden put it, “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition.” The experiment, Biden said, had run its course, and he announced, through executive order, a return to the older antitrust model championed by the Roosevelts—Presidents Theodore and Franklin D., both of whom saw antitrust as key to balancing economic power.

The first step of this plan was appointing officials—Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice and Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission—who were deeply committed to the antitrust revival and to enforcing the laws as intended by Congress. Those appointments resurrected the tradition of the “trustbuster”—government enforcers who are genuine adversaries of monopoly.  For Kanter and Khan, earning the enmity of the Chamber of Commerce has been a badge of honor.

Khan and Kanter rebooted the Rooseveltian tradition of bringing “big” cases (a rarity since the Clinton administration’s case against Microsoft’s monopoly). Big cases have structural ambitions: They seek to shake up an industry, whether by attacking a monopoly or blocking a merger that threatens to create one. To the surprise of many detractors, Kanter and Khan brought and won a string of these cases, including a major monopoly suit against Google (originally filed by the Trump administration) and successful challenges to major mergers by airlines (the first such legal victory ever), pharmaceutical companies, grocery giants, and publishing houses.

As in baseball, swinging for the fences risks big losses, and many critics predicted that the campaign would be rejected wholesale by courts. Kanter and Khan decided to take the chance, based on the theory that an agency unwilling to risk any losses earns a place in the “chickenshit club.” By the end, they had taken both big losses and big wins—but, when added up, there were more of the latter. In all but a few cases, the courts, even in conservative districts, have tended to accept the approach of enforcing the law as written. In merger cases, the agencies won more than 30 challenges (including many mergers that were abandoned when challenged, without going to trial), and the anti-monopoly ruling against Google is the most significant such victory in decades.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, we sought to push the antitrust revival forward by enlisting more parts of the government in the effort, borrowing from similar ideas undertaken by FDR and Obama. We set up something new: a competition council inside the White House, chaired by the president, designed to push agencies to do what they could to fight imbalances in the economy.

The first real test for our White House–driven effort was hearing aids. The president in 2021 tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with writing a rule that would allow hearing devices to be sold over the counter to treat mild to moderate hearing loss. At the time, despite years of pressure and even congressional action, hearing aids remained available by prescription only, reducing available options and allowing manufacturers to keep prices artificially high. This naturally slowed uptake among the millions of Americans with compromised hearing. Today, thanks to the administration’s efforts, there’s a healthy market for over-the-counter hearing aids. The comparative ease of market entry was illustrated most recently by Apple’s decision to include a hearing-aid function in its new AirPods Pro.

A second White House effort centered on “junk fees,” those annoying additions that make prices unclear, interfere with competitive markets, and infuriate nearly everyone. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, headed by Rohit Chopra, took the lead with a rule cracking down on junky banking and credit-card fees, which are expected to save Americans billions of dollars in random charges.

Four years of organized action, involving the sustained labor of a lot of people, have put antitrust and competition policy on a different course. That new course is, I would submit, more broadly in line with what Americans believe in: an economy in which monopoly is prevented or fought, not tolerated or encouraged. It has upset those who preferred the more laissez-faire approach of the previous 40 years, yet there is strong reason to doubt that a more monopolized economy has been good for our nation.  

Will the Trump administration reverse all that was done, dismissing the ongoing cases and returning things to the way they once were? No doubt many people, including some of Trump’s wealthier supporters, would relish a nullification of the law and a merger bonanza. But a party centered on economic grievance and the working class runs serious political risks if it promotes the monopolization of the economy at the expense of its voting base.

Antitrust law has never been partisan. Republican presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Trump himself, commenced many of its biggest cases; it was the Reagan administration, despite its broader anti-enforcement shift, that ultimately broke up AT&T. Many outsiders seem to wrongly assume that incoming President Trump will be personally involved in assessing every merger. The fact is that the turn toward a tougher antitrust regime better reflects where the public is: No broad constituency wants more monopolies or higher prices for life’s necessities.

As politicians and historians know, but as many can forget, there is a fundamental difference between political and policy cycles. The politics of our moment are divided and subject to frequent reversals of fortune. But policy is a longer game, and since the Great Recession, there has been an undeniable shift toward questioning the wisdom of laissez-faire capitalism, globalization, and other neoliberal tenets from the 1980s and ’90s. However divided our politics may be, there is consensus that the economy should be fairer and its returns shared by more people. That is why the rehabilitation of antitrust will likely be a lasting legacy of the Biden administration.