President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission signals a break from the aggressive stance of the commission under President Joe Biden. However, it also tees up a fight within the new Republican administration over the role of the FTC, with self-fashioned populists and more overtly big business-friendly Republicans disagreeing over the commission’s purpose and whether it should even exist.
The FTC maintained an unusually high profile in the 2024 election, with Lina Khan, the chair under Biden, drawing praise from progressives and scorn from some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s more corporate-friendly allies and advisors.
It’s not just the Democratic Party that Khan’s FTC leadership has divided, however. A handful of self-fashioned populist Republicans like Vice President-elect JD Vance, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, former Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Ken Buck, R-Colo., have expressed support for Khan. Collectively, these Republicans have been called "Khanservatives."
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“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing. And I guess 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 at Boomberg’s Remedy Fest earlier this year.
There has been no shortage of commentary questioning how serious Vance and other Republicans are in their support for........