Donald Trump’s Assault on Capitalism

Opinion|Donald Trump’s Assault on Capitalism

Ask an American conservative what makes America great, and at least until about a week ago, he might have said that, among other virtues, it’s a country in which the government stays out of the business of getting in business.

Yes, there are exceptions — Fannie Mae and Amtrak come to mind — but their record of mismanagement and mediocrity would prove the conservative’s point. Other democratic countries have government-controlled champion enterprises, and some of them, like the Airbus consortium in Europe, sometimes do well. Yet the heavy hand of the state tends to lead to problems over time, including corruption, inefficiency and a reluctance to let bad companies fail.

But American conservatism under President Trump is changing into something unrecognizable, at least to those of us (silly us!) who thought the movement had guiding principles beyond getting, wielding and abusing power. Umpteenth case in point: the federal government becoming an equity shareholder in Intel.

This month, Trump called for the resignation of Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s new chief executive, based on vague allegations that he had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military. (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore.) Trump also decided to convert nearly $9 billion in government funding promised to Intel under the 2022 CHIPS Act, a piece of industrial policy intended to boost the U.S. semiconductor manufactures, into an equity stake.

“You know what? I think the United States should be given 10 percent of Intel,” Trump says he told Tan in a White House meeting on Friday. Tan speedily agreed. On Monday, Trump boasted on social media that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.”

If a Democratic president did this to Tan or any other American chief executive, Republicans would call it a political shakedown, an assault on capitalism, a loser for taxpayers. They’d be right. Intel, which had a $500 billion market cap at the turn of the century, is now at $107 billion. What’s to keep it from going lower and taking taxpayers down with it?