Republicans have for decades hammered the tired refrain that Democrats are “radical socialists” who will lead the country to ruin. In 2020, former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) laid out the stakes of electing Joe Biden and his party. “Their vision for America is socialism,” she said. “And we know socialism has failed everywhere.”
Democratic Party leaders seem to agree. When President Trump announced in his 2019 State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist country,” even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined the chorus of colleagues who stood and applauded.
A 2021 report unpacking the 2020 election results concluded that “Republican attempts to brand Democrats as ‘radicals’ worked” — particularly in messaging around “radical socialists” and “defund the police,” as well as among “immigrant populations that fled socialist governments, including among Venezuelan, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Filipino voters.”
And despite Zohran Mamdani’s strong victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the self-proclaimed socialist has been shunned by numerous prominent New York Democrats. This includes Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
But now it is Trump who is acting like a socialist. Corporate donors should take note.
In June, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel on the condition that it give the White House a “golden share” of the Japanese company. Although it is not an equity stake, Trump declared, “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls.”
On Aug. 22, Intel announced an agreement with the administration to take $8.9 billion in the company’s common stock, approximately a 10 percent stake, making the U.S. the largest investor in the tech giant that builds the semiconductor chips that power smartphones, computers and data centers.
This deal is no freebie for the American taxpayer. It is in lieu of Intel repaying the federal grants it received under the bipartisan U.S. Chips and Science Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022. Earlier last month, Trump also made a deal with two of Intel’s rivals, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, requiring them to pay 15 percent of the revenues made from sales to China to the U.S.
Although most of the Republican Party has cheered on Trump’s plans to acquire stakes in other companies, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote on X, “If socialism is government owning the means of production, wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism?”
And tellingly, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed the move.
The fact that too few Americans seem to notice this Republican incoherence could stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “s-word” even means. In 2018, a Gallup poll found that 23 percent of Americans defined socialism as equality, 17 percent as state control of the economy, 10 percent as social welfare and public services, 6 percent as “talking to people, being social, social media, getting along with people,” and another 6 percent in “non-specific” derogatory terms.
Two recent surveys demarcate socialism as the opposite of capitalism. A May Rasmussen poll found that 71 percent of likely voters continue to reject socialism in favor of free-market capitalism. That number could be changing, as a Cato/YouGov survey of Americans under 30 showed 62 percent favoring socialism over capitalism, and 34 percent viewing communism favorably.
Most dictionaries define socialism as an economic, social and political system calling for governmental ownership and control of property, the means of production and the distribution of goods. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels advocated for social control of resources in their 1848 Manifesto of Communist Party as the means of achieving true freedom and prosperity. But they viewed socialism as a mere step toward communism, which rejects social classes, money and the state entirely in favor of common ownership.
Socialism thus means all sorts of things to all sorts of Americans across the political divide. British journalist James Bloodworth has argued that socialism is hard to define in contemporary society because “the word [is] being used as both a synonym for communism and a wooly affectation, an appellation which signals that one cares about worthy causes.”
Trump’s brand of socialism is not the wooly kind. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain, since Trump’s conflation of government and the private sector is occurring “outside of a crisis situation,” it is both “unprecedented” and “aggressive” — not necessarily a good thing.
For starters, it is bad for Intel because the company can no longer take steps that are strictly in the best interests of its shareholders. If what Intel needs to do is politically unpopular for the White House — such as closing plants or laying off workers — it must now think twice. Other companies seeking to land a government contract might need to prioritize U.S.-owned vendors such as Intel, even if their products are not what their companies need. Or they might worry first and foremost about what Trump himself wants. (Prior to the deal, the president demanded that Intel fire its CEO, Lip Bu-Tan, due to prior ties to the Chinese military.)
Trump’s apologists might point to the bank bailouts by President George W. Bush (continued by President Barack Obama) during the 2008 financial crisis or the existence of government corporations such as Amtrak and the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned electric utility corporation — as historical examples justifying this administration’s grabbing the levers of private sector control. But unlike with the Intel deal, the bank bailouts were temporary. And both Amtrak and the Tennessee Valley Authority were created by Congress.
Trump’s actions, by comparison, are an extraordinary flex of presidential power. When President Harry Truman tried to take over private steel production during the Korean War, the Supreme Court held in the 1952 Youngstown Steel case that he had exceeded his constitutional authority and violated separation of powers because he lacked any constitutional or statutory basis for the seizure.
Trump’s scheme looks more like the governments of Greece, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Taiwan, which own strategic segments of the airline, rail, telecommunications, automobile and defense industries. Worse, as Mark Williams of Boston University told Newsweek, “If such White House policies expand past AI chips and steel and into other strategic industries, it would move the U.S. toward a brand of government-managed capitalism like Russia and China.”
Free markets and limited government are under threat, and capitalists — who hold real power over American politics — should be alarmed. In Sen. Paul’s words, “Today it’s Intel, tomorrow it could be any industry.”
Kimberly Wehle is author of the book “Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why.”