Ok, so welcome to a new era of deal enforcement. In the next month or so, we'll get a real sense of what Trump 2.0 will mean for the deal environment. Many on Wall Street appear to believe that it's going to be back to the "days of wine and roses" for deals. Maybe. Right now, I'm a little hesitant to hop on that particular bandwagon. What is already clear — and two pending transactions will make it more obvious – is that Trump 2.0 will be selectively aggressive in its enforcement. While one might disagree with Lina Khan's "hipster antitrust" there is no denying that she had a cogent framework for enforcing the antitrust laws. What we looking at in the near future is demonstrably different. It seems like there will be no coherent approach to antitrust other than as an instrument to facilitate other aims of the administration. For example, take a look at the Skydance-Paramount deal. Already there are signs that the FCC will seek to extract substantive changes to the messaging come out of CBS News as the price of its approval. This from Charlie Gasparino's piece in the NY Post:
Skydance had hoped to close the deal during the first quarter of this year; incoming Federal Communication Commission chair Brendan Carr has signaled that’s not likely to happen, these people add. He won’t rubber-stamp the $8 billion tie-up because he believes there’s evidence that Paramount’s TV-subsidiary, CBS News, plays fast and loose with basic FCC fairness rules all networks (as opposed to cable) must meet to air programming over the public airwaves.
Next up, follow what happens to the Hulu-FuboTV deal. Hulu is, obviously, owned by Disney, which also owns ABC and ABC News. How the new administration deals with these two transactions right out of the gate will tell you a lot about what to expect in the next four years.
-bjmq