Lots of monopoly-related news, as usual. Meta was exposed as allegedly enabling sex trafficking the same week it won its case against the government over monopolization claims, there are new numbers on just how much of an oligarchy we’ve become, and Google is now set to take over AI now that its pesky antitrust troubles are behind it.

The big news of the week is a change in the political establishment, based on two events. The first is the public exile of economist Larry Summers from polite society over his ties to notorious sex trafficker Jeff Epstein, the second is a surprising joint press conference of President Donald Trump and incoming New York City mayor, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Let’s start with Summers. As I noted last week, the powerful economist has been heavily involved in nearly every major economic policy decision since the Clinton Presidency, from the Mexican Peso Crisis in early 1990s to NAFTA and U.S.-Chinese trade liberalization, to deregulating derivatives to repealing Glass-Steagall to the bailout out of the banks after 2008 to the Biden economic framework. Of late, he was a foe of Lina Khan and anti-monopolists.

But his track record of poor statecraft is not why he has fallen from grace. What caused him to be ousted was that he embarrassed too many people by being such a pig for so long. So after emails came out showing a close relationship with Summers and Epstein, the word went out, Summers is persona non grata. Last week, he stepped down from his board position at OpenAI, as well as his positions at Bloomberg News, The New York Times, the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the Center for American Progress, the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Yale Budget Lab. He is also under investigation by Harvard, where he is a University Professor.

There’s an attempt, in this fiasco, to pretend that Summers is a genius who was otherwise brought down by ego. Most of the articles I’ve read start with his “brilliance,” mentioning how he got tenure at 28, or went through important institutions, or had immense influence in big decisions. In this narrative, his relationship with Epstein is an anomaly, a weakness of an otherwise great man.

I don’t think this narrative makes sense. When Larry Summers started his career, in the early 1980s, America was rich, confident and powerful, and the U.S. establishment had influence, wealth, and prestige. After listening to Summers for forty years, the U.S. establishment is enfeebled, disliked and regularly mocked, in no small part because they did listen to him. The Summers-Epstein relationship, in other words, isn’t a singular episode of bad judgment in a brilliant career, it is one more terrible decision in a career of terrible decisions camouflaged by corrupt elites.

Even the narrative of ‘brilliant man brought low by personal weakness’ is itself part of the problem. Anand Giridharadas has an excellent rundown of how this episode shows just how corrupt the elite world really is, and why they are rightfully despised.

And that brings me to the second event, which is the surprisingly amiable press conference with Trump and Mamdani, where Trump expressed affection for the young politician, and they shared their respect for New York City. In a sense, the image itself does much of the work:

Both the Republican and Democratic establishments were confused and upset by this press conference, because it scrambled their assumptions of what constitutes politics. “I almost couldn’t speak,” said one Trump ally.

And in a sense, this disdain and skepticism makes sense; it’s hard to see any good vibes lasting for very long, considering the institutional forces arrayed against any sort of genuine partnership, and the track records of the two men. Trump has bet big on the AI bubble and Wall Street, while Mamdani seems to have a more skeptical approach to corporate power.

But both Trump and Mamdani defeated the establishment in their own way, representing the hunger of voters on the right and left who want something different. If those sides could come together, well, that would be a sea change in how we organize our political economy. It’s not going to happen now. But Trump and Mamdani just gave us a very modest hint of what that might one day look like.

And that is why there was so much establishment gnashing of teeth over a simple set of images, it throws in their face their own failures to retain the respect of the American people. It is in many ways the same reason why so many have to insist, even now, upon Larry Summers being singularly brilliant. They have to invent some reason they kept listening to him long after they knew it was unwise.

And now, the rest of the round-up, after the paywall. Lots of fascinating stuff in there. For instance, a judge ruled that the Trump Antitrust Division may have to answer for allegedly selling merger approvals via corporate lobbyists, there’s now an antitrust case against the fire truck cabal, the the stock market got wobbly, and new data shows that Americans don’t trust AI because they think it’ll be used to screw them over…

Read on for more...