Is Trump’s DOJ Being Set Up to Lose?

Update: The Justice Department announced Saturday it would allow the Hewlett Packard Enterprise merger with Juniper Networks to go forward after a settlement was reached.

The Trump administration has made revitalizing American industry and taking on the Chinese Communist Party top priorities. But those efforts are being jeopardized by a misguided antitrust lawsuit that threatens not just a merger, but the fate of the entire “America First” agenda.

Next month, the Department of Justice is set to bring its first antitrust trial under President Donald Trump, targeting Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. That merger was intended to build a stronger U.S.-based telecom company capable of competing with China’s Huawei, a firm identified by the Department of Defense as controlled by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

The HPE-Juniper case is not anticompetitive. It’s a patriotic play to win the global tech race.

Huawei currently has 30% of the global marketplace under its thumb. The next closest American competitor that’s not HPE or Juniper has less than 10%.

Letting this merger fly is a no-brainer. Yet instead of backing American innovation, the DOJ is preparing to take them to court.

This wasn’t a decision made by Trump’s confirmed antitrust team. It originated under the Biden administration and was then filed by an interim head before Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater were sworn in. The Trump administration’s full, confirmed team inherited this case. Now, it must decide whether to own it.

It shouldn’t.

The economic and legal foundation of the case is weak. Even after combining, HPE and Juniper would fall well below the 30% market share threshold that antitrust enforcers and the courts have long used to trigger heightened scrutiny under the Philadelphia National Bank standard.

In other words, this case will fail in court. And Trump doesn’t like losing. He said that under his watch, the American people will “win so much, you may even get tired of winning.” 

But if the DOJ pushes ahead with this trial, it won’t be tired of winning. It’ll be stuck explaining why it lost a fight it never should’ve picked.

And the cost of losing goes beyond a single courtroom defeat. It will also have negative effects that spill over into Trump’s other America First economic and foreign policy goals.

By delaying this merger, the Trump administration will hand a win to China and a loss to American innovation. That’s the opposite of the America First vision voters supported in 2024.

This administration was elected to unleash American enterprise, bring critical industries home, and win the global economic competition. That starts by supporting American companies, not targeting them with politically motivated legal theories left over from the last administration.

Trump understands that national strength depends on economic strength. He also understands that bad cases make bad law, and this is a bad case. The right move isn’t to double down. It’s to pull the plug and move on to battles that matter.

The DOJ should drop this case before it does lasting damage to the president’s agenda, to American competitiveness, and to our ability to confront real threats to the republic.