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It should come as no surprise to anyone who has watched Donald Trump, especially during his first term, that his choices for cabinet secretaries and other key positions are a wild, haphazard, hodgepodge of ideologies, political factions and establishment popularity. To me, this is classic Trump, and how power ends up being dispersed in the Trump presidency remains to be seen. Still, while recognizing the limited value these choices have in revealing what is to come, they are far from meaningless, after all, Trump did choose them, and I think they foretell many likely policy conflicts on the horizon.

To help us understand many of these recent choices and what they represent for key domestic positions, as well as their impact on a wide range of issues, we will speak to Matt Stoller, of the Economic Liberties Project, in my view one of the nation's most informed experts on the attempt to use antitrust law to chop up monopolistic power and protect consumer choices against centralized, unaccountable corporate control.

Matt Stoller is so many things that it's very hard to list. I'm going to have to be very selective, otherwise, we're going to spend 45 minutes talking about who Matt is. To begin with he is with the Economic Liberty Institute and is also the author of BIG, on Substack, which, as its name suggests, focuses on antitrust violations and how particularly Big Tech, but other corporations as well, become so big that they're unmanageable. He's the author of what I consider to be certainly one of the definitive histories, if not the definitive history on the history of antitrust and democracy, and particularly how it focuses on Big Tech. The name of that book is “Goliath, The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.” He's also a friend of the show and a friend of some of us here, including me. 

G. Greenwald: Matt, it is great to see you tonight. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. We appreciate it. 

Matt Stoller: Hey, thanks for having me.

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, we have a lot to talk about, so why don't we just dive right in? A lot is going on, obviously, since Trump's victory and a lot of these appointments are generating some really interesting analysis and big question marks given how they're not exactly a model of cogency, which is what one would expect from Donald Trump. Before we get into all of that, though, there's a lot of debate, every time there's a new nominee chosen to head the department to be a cabinet secretary, there's all this digging and saying, what does this mean? Look, this person is this, that means the administration is going to be this or, this person is the opposite, that means the administration will be that. Giving is Donald Trump in general, but also how Washington works, how reliable of an indicator do you think these nominations are when it comes to the question of what Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office is going to decide and what his administration will be?

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Lee Fang is my longtime colleague at The Intercept where he did some of the best investigative reporting and broke some of the best and most important stories, just using traditional shoe-leather reporting, falling money, tracing what these kinds of invisible but very powerful factions in Washington are doing in a way that few other people can or do. He's still doing exactly the same thing, but he's doing it at his outstanding Substack – www.leefang.com/ – which I think you do yourself a great favor to read.

G. Greenwald:  Good evening, Lee. Thank you for coming on. 

Lee Fang: Hey, great to see you, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: Okay, good. You have been writing about Trump's appointees, not necessarily positively or negatively, but more about the reasons why so many of these power factions in Washington, corporate and political, have been opposing them – and more importantly, how. 

“Inside the Junk Food Lobby's Plans to Derail RFK's Agenda” is one of your new articles and it's interesting because there's not a lot of attention being paid to RFK yet – negative attention is spent on Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, or Tulsi Gabbard – but it's definitely coming. That's for sure. It's just too big of an industry, billions and billions of dollars at stake, not to have it at some point become a focus. So, before we get to what they're doing to RFK, or what it is about his agenda that they dislike, tell us what is this junk food industry. 

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Glenn Greenwald: When I first started writing about politics and doing journalism, in 2005, one of the main focal points that almost everybody talked about was the toxic influence of neoconservatives. That was the first part of the George Bush-Dick Cheney administration and neocons like Douglas Feith and people who worked for Dick Cheney were extremely influential in the war in Iraq, the entire War on Terror as we came to know it. A lot of us thought that once George Bush and Dick Cheney were out of office, the discredited neocons would go away, and yet they never did. When Joe Biden was elected, people like Victoria Nuland were back in office, the neocons migrated to the Democratic Party, and now we have this increasingly dangerous war that is escalating as we speak, one that began in 2022, but that the United States played a great role in helping to provoke. As it turns out, the name of our next guest’s new book is “Provoked.”

Scott Horton is, I think, one of the best, if not the single best critic of neoconservatism over the years, but also of American foreign policy and its endless war machine. His book is about the obsession that the United States, for whatever reasons, has had with Russia, starting a new Cold War, and especially the catastrophe in Ukraine. Scott is a good friend of the show and we are always happy to have him on. 

G. Greenwald: Scott, good evening. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Scott Horton: Happy to be here Glenn. Thank you very much. Of course, I've been a big fan of yours since back in 2005.