Harris’s Silence on FTC Chair Shows Billionaires Are Winning the Election
The Veepification of U.S. politics reached its climax this month, as Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on a swing state campaign tour alongside former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney. Their slogan? “Country Over Party” — an appeal to bipartisan unity that could also be construed as a celebration for the country’s demise. Social media users were quick to point out echoes of the HBO show.
Harris’s latest Cheney endeavor is part of her last-ditch attempt to win over disaffected GOP voters. As polls show that blue-collar workers are increasingly lining up behind Donald Trump, Harris has tried to make her “opportunity economy” agenda a focal point of her campaign. She’s tried to fashion herself as a champion of the working class, while noting in speeches and ads that Trump would be “a disaster for working people.” Meanwhile, her campaign has flaunted the endorsements of more than 200 Republicans, including 17 former staffers from Ronald Reagan’s administration. As president, the only thing she’d do differently than Joe Biden, she told CNN, is appoint a Republican to her cabinet.
But despite the endorsements, the cabinet pledge, the pivot to right-wing policies on immigration and fracking, Harris has barely moved the needle among voters. Polling shows the presidential race is still neck and neck. The Harris campaign’s strategy of throwing a lovefest for the GOP is particularly baffling given her choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as vice president — an overture to progressives that was quickly abandoned for redder pastures.
Amid this muddled messaging, one of the Harris campaign’s most confounding choices is its silence on Lina Khan, the 35-year-old chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) who has unabashedly put Big Tech and Big Pharma in the agency’s crosshairs.
Appointed by Biden in 2021, Khan has already had a legendary run as FTC chair, spearheading antitrust lawsuits against corporate tech giants like Amazon, Meta and Nvidia. In April, Khan’s FTC announced a rule banning noncompete clauses: employer-enforced agreements that adversely impact roughly 30 million workers by preventing them from seeking new jobs with competitors once their employment ends. (A federal district court in Texas blocked the rule in August; the FTC has appealed the decision.) Another rule, announced this month, would make it easier for people to cancel subscriptions.
Under Khan, the FTC has sued to block Kroger’s acquisition of Albertsons — the largest proposed supermarket merger in U.S. history — which Khan has said could raise already exorbitant grocery prices. Food inflation has been a major talking point on the campaign trail for both candidates, and Harris has proposed a price gouging ban to ease consumers’ grocery store sticker shock. Khan’s anti-monopolist ethos is easily legible to the coveted working-class voter; she supports commonsense policies that most people want. Uplifting Khan and publicizing the wins she’s already established for the Biden administration should be a no-brainer for the Harris campaign — but instead, there are rumors that Harris could push the trustbuster out.
This is U.S. politics, so, unsurprisingly, money has something to do with it. Reporters and pundits — and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — have pointed to the Democratic billionaires supporting Harris’s campaign as reason for why she has not said whether she would support keeping Khan as FTC chair if elected president.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has hit the campaign trail for Harris; LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman has poured millions of dollars into supporting her candidacy; IAC Chairman and media mogul Barry Diller has announced plans to “donate the maximum allowed” to her campaign. They also all have beef with Lina Khan, and they’ve publicly told reporters that they hope Harris will replace her.
Other business titans supporting Harris include billionaire Mike Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. With some of the country’s most powerful corporate executives in her back pocket, it’s all too easy for Harris’s working-class pitch to seem like a smoke-and-mirrors show.
Trump, of course, is no real friend to the working class, receiving millions of dollars in donations from his own cadre of billionaire allies and even launching a tour with Tesla CEO and megadonor Elon Musk. While president, Trump implemented tax cuts for the rich, made anti-union appointees to the National Labor Relations Board and rolled back wage protections for tipped workers. Still, despite the policies he champions, Trump has strategically embraced economic populism in his messaging, managing to make inroads where Democrats have stalled.
Ironically, as a thorn in the side of U.S. corporations, Khan has won favor with both progressive Democrats and some MAGA Republicans, including Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance. If Harris truly wanted to win over more working-class voters, pledging to keep Khan as FTC chair would likely help more than hurt — and she might pick up some progressive Democrats on the way.
Instead, Harris has chosen to cave to right-wing fearmongering on immigration and crime, embracing a carceral crackdown at the southern border. She has dismissed calls for a ceasefire and arms embargo and reaffirmed her support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, even as she risks losing the support of Arab American voters in the battleground state of Michigan.
It increasingly seems that, whoever is voted into office in November, the country’s billionaires stand to win big. As Harris joins Cheney under the “Country Over Party” banner, perhaps a more slogan would be, “Money Over Country.”