Former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya told MS NOW anchor Rachel Maddow that his former agency, which is supposed to operate independently, has become a “billionaire’s fan club.”
On Monday night’s episode of her show, Maddow noted how the Supreme Court ruled this week that the president is not free to fire Federal Reserve governors but does have the power to fire commissioners and members of the Federal Trade Commission. Bedoya, who was fired by President Trump from his FTC position in March 2025, said that the court’s decision suggests that “Wall Street bankers, the central bankers, they deserve an independent above-the-fray regulator, while the rest of us schmucks get stuck with the loyalists.”
“When I think ‘loyalists’ in the abstract, in general, I think about people who are part of the president’s general ideological mien,” Maddow replied. “But when it comes to Donald Trump, I think of loyalists as people who are there to serve Trump and the Trump family’s financial interests — and potentially political interests.”
“This is par for the course for the Supreme Court,” Bedoya added. “These are the folks who said that corporations are people, so they can spend as much as they want in their elections, that corporations can deny real people their day in court and now the latest thing is that, if a CEO of one of these corporations loads up on President Trump’s crypto coin or decides to donate to his weird golden ballroom, President Trump is immune from accusations of bribery.”
“This decision today should just be added to that list,” he continued. “We need to recognize the fact that this thing has become a billionaire’s fan club.”
“The FTC and so many other agencies like it are the ones that protect regular people who are trying to make rent, pay groceries, pay their health insurance and make payroll,” Bedoya further stated. He went on to point to the photos that were released last year of billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all standing behind President Trump at his second inauguration.
“Who is going to get hurt? It’s the people who those guys are hurting,” Bedoya said. “If you are a mom-and-pop business, you have to be on Amazon, and yet Amazon squeezes you for 50 cents on every dollar. When you offer a lower price off Amazon … they punish you by taking you out of that preferred buy box where most people just click.”
“If you’re just one of those regular people who’s getting screwed over by these massive corporations, the FTC, we’re the ones who help you,” he explained. “The concern is it’s not going to matter who is in the right. What’s going to matter is who has given to the president and how much have they given to the president.”
