Avowed democratic-socialist Zohran Mamdani will be sworn-in as New York City mayor in less than two weeks—and last month he named former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to co-chair his transition team. Despite the heated back-and-forth jabs thrown at each other for months, tensions between Mamdani and President Trump have cooled. But it shouldn’t be all sunshine and rainbows. Lina Khan’s appointment reveals a much darker reality: Khan’s anti-market, anti-tech influence is coming to America’s financial capital—and conservatives have spent years giving it support.
Lina Khan’s affinity for progressive politics has never been a secret. In a New York Times editorial earlier this year, Khan praised then-candidate Mamdani’s rediscovery of the progressive era’s New Deal roots, casting modern economics as a battle between big and small business. Of course that kind of rhetoric would seamlessly fit in a Mamdani’s campaign against the so-called “oligarchs” of New York City, with Khan going so far as to speak at a Mamdani Town Hall event during the campaign.
Before that, in 2022, then-FTC Commissioner Lina Khan spoke at a Yale Law School event sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) with the express intent to “teach attendees how to advance the goals of socialism.”
While an academic fellow at Columbia Law School, a younger Lina Khan gave a somewhat milder speech on “Progressivism, Socialism, Nationalism.” But as the United States Chamber of Commerce noted at the time, the agenda discussed “intersectional exploitation,” “mediating tensions between capitalist order and democratic self-rule,” and “the relationship between market supremacy and racial, gender, and economic injustice.”
These are not flippant socialist flirtations—they are the culmination of a worldview years in the making. A worldview that threatens to upend the daily economic interactions of millions of people. One that has migrated from federal agencies inside the beltway to the streets of America’s most dynamic city and the financial capital of the world.
The failures of the Khan-led FTC are legion. Just last week, news broke that the American company, iRobot, is being sold to a Chinese firm, after the Khan FTC helped European regulators block Amazon’s acquisition of the company. Before that, in 2023, the FTC pressured the company, Illumina, to divest its $7.1 billion re-acquisition of the company, Grail, a merger that would have pioneered research into new cancer detection methods, likely costing lives and preventing lower consumer healthcare prices. Ironically, in other cases, Lina Khan thought prices were too low, not too high. A stark contrast to a Mamdani campaign focused on affordability and a lower cost of living.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed this type of antitrust tinkering, which was disappointing but also unsurprising. More worrying was that Khan’s policy decisions at the FTC were praised by a small contingent of prominent conservative government officials, including Congressman Matt Gaetz, Senator Josh Hawley, and then-Senator J.D. Vance, who were all too willing to cut a deal to let hijacked federal agencies meddle in markets so long as Big Tech felt the heat.
To be fair, politicians can endorse strong antitrust enforcement and not be socialist—but those same politicians must reckon not only with Lina Khan’s alignment with democratic-socialist Zohran Mamdani, but also the many parallels that Khan’s school antitrust thought shares with the core tenets of Marxism and Critical Legal Theory. As former FTC commissioner Christine Wilson and legal scholar Adam Cella detailed in a 2022 George Mason Law Review article, Khan’s views of antitrust alignment with many Marxist views on the rule of law and the economy.
Lina Khan’s new position on Mamdani’s transition team has revealed conservative endorsements to be a mistake. When not talking nice in the Oval Office, President Trump has taken issue with Mamdani’s self-described democratic-socialist views, insisting that Mamdani is “far worse than a socialist” and calling him “Communist, not socialist. Communist.” Conservatives cannot have it both ways. Either Mayor Mamdani is a socialist or communist worth fighting or he is not.
After Lina Khan’s FTC departure, it surprised some that the Trump administration did not undo the damage of Khan’s reign at the FTC, including the decision to keep her controversial 2023 merger guidelines, which set a new playbook for punishing even pro-market, pro-consumer antitrust activity. Defending that decision, Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson fairly argued that if merger enforcement is always changing, then courts will not be able to rely on them and businesses will lose certainty. In the scenario, competition policy would become competition politics. Fair enough—but that’s no excuse for inaction.
Without significant changes to their approach to competition policy, the Trump administration will instead give certainty to the courts and industry that they are playing by the same Lina Khan playbook. If conservatives are unwilling to get rid of the Biden-era guidelines, they can at least pick better antitrust cases—ones they are more certain to win—or otherwise settle ongoing weak cases brought in the Khan-era. Better cases would not manipulate and butcher market definitions, and they would not stretch and abuse antitrust laws to target companies solely based on size.
What must not happen is that conservatives continue to pursue highly controversial Khan-aligned policies in the nation’s capital while decrying “socialist!” in press conferences on TV.
Despite the friendly optics in front of reporters in the Oval Office, Mayor Mamdani’s decision to appoint former-FTC Chair Khan to co-chair his transition team reveals to conservatives a lesson they should have already learned: the United States does not need two teams of socialists fighting one another. It needs at least one contingent of policymakers devoted to strong capitalist leadership. To get there, Conservatives must expressly denounce socialism in all forms. It must end its love affair with “Khanservatism.”
Logan Kolas is the Director of Technology Policy at the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.