I’m not the first to observe that this is strange talk from a president who keeps seizing the means of production. Trump made the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger contingent on the United States reserving a “golden share” that gives it significant control over wages, plant closings, and the like. (I kind of liked that.) In July, the Pentagon bought a 15 percent stake in MP Minerals, the only company that mines rare earth minerals here in the United States (near Las Vegas). Trump initially blocked (on national security grounds) Nvidia from selling AI chips to China, then changed his mind and said the chips could be sold but that the United States would take a 15 percent cut of all sales. He imposed the same terms on another chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices.
But Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has made clear she is not a democratic socialist—and who co-sponsored Sanders’ failed amendment but voted for the CHIPS Act anyway—does not extend her blessing. “The president just saying he wants the public to have a stake in a major company,” Warren told Reuters, “isn’t the same as having a real strategy to rein in stock buybacks, onshore jobs, and support long-term economic growth in America.”
Before I answer that question, let’s pause to savor how much Trump’s allies are squirming over this. The United States Chamber of Commerce, which is surely in a panic, is saying nothing. Over on Fox News, Trump pom-pom shaker Maria Bartiromo said, “There are definitely reasons to raise your eyebrows about this situation,” but then excused it in light of national security. (Then why is the United States now party to conveying Nvidia and AMD chips to China?)
You might say that a spectre haunts Mar-e-Lago, but it isn’t precisely communism. It isn’t even democratic socialism. As I’ve explained earlier, what Trump practices is fascist corporatism, which is why Warren is right to keep her distance (and why Sanders should, too).
Converting a CHIPS grant to Intel into equity has a certain appeal, because, sure, the taxpayer should get some return on his investment. But it introduces all kinds of tricky questions about how, over the long term, you regulate a business owned by the government. (When President Barack Obama had the Treasury purchase shares in General Motors to bail it out, it was understood the investment would be temporary.) And anyway, the “return on taxpayer investment” theme doesn’t apply to many of Trump’s schemes. The patent-tax idea, for example, is just extortion. And in a way the Intel equity deal is extortion, too, because Trump began this negotiation by trying to get Intel’s chief executive canned. Democratic socialists don’t extort. Fascists do.
Also, there’s the matter of personal indebtedness to Trump. The president is imposing loyalty tests on 553 corporations, and the loyalty he requires isn’t to the United States, but to Trump himself. The language of the golden share deal with U.S. Steel mentions Trump by name, which seems an open invitation for Trump to exploit his power over that corporation for personal gain. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump’s name in the contractual language with Intel as well.
Trump’s incursions into the market economy play out against a background of dismantling the administrative state (with an impressive assist last week from the Fifth Circuit, which last week threw a wrench into the National Labor Relations Board, in effect ruling that the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, needn’t pay it any heed). It doesn’t strike me as notably communist for a leader simultaneously to disable government administration and at the same time to interfere with commerce on an ad hoc basis. But regulation by personal whim is characteristic of fascist corporatism. Another characteristic is that the business community allows fascists to acquire strength under the delusion that it can appease them.
And of course, fascism has always thrived on scapegoating communists, whether communists were a real presence or not. It seems a bit silly now that communism is almost entirely a spent force. Can’t Trump and Stephen Miller find a more up-to-date epithet? But I suppose it sort of worked in 2024. So expect Trump to keep red-hunting while he nationalizes America’s corporations. It’s what fascist
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