One of the most striking pictures in Jonathan Kanter’s office is a cartoon of a wrecked airship called “High Finance”, featuring business magnates of early 1900s America as stranded passengers.

The doomed aircraft’s splintered blades bear the names of large trusts and a broken-up corporation, while hovering above it is the apparent cause of the crash: a black cloud labelled “investigation”, “merger decision” and “law”.

The image was made in 1904, at the height of the trustbusting era pioneered by then president Theodore Roosevelt. But if Kanter, head of the US Justice Department’s antitrust unit, has his way, cartoonists might be inspired to draw similar scenes more than 100 years later.

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“He’s not just your standard bureaucrat . . . He’s not afraid to lose, and that’s very unusual among enforcers,” said Matt Stoller, director of research at the progressive American Economic Liberties Project.

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