Trump Says Communism Is America's Greatest Threat ... His Government Is Buying Into 30 Companies.
The administration warning America about communism is buying into Intel and 28 other companies while holding veto power over US Steel.
Intel’s largest shareholder warned America about the very dangerous threat of communism last week. That shareholder just so happens to be the United States government, which converted federal grants into a 9.9 percent stake in the chipmaker last summer.
Under Donald Trump, the federal government has kept shopping for state-owned investment into the private markets ever since. Which is what made the official White House warning on X land so poorly: “Communism is the greatest threat to our country.” Wait, what?
It takes a special kind of shamelessness to type that sentence from inside a government buying into 30 American companies. Sort of like getting a lecture on the benefits of sobriety delivered from a guy on a barstool after he’s had two dozen shots.
The White House is bravely fighting communism with X posts, while its own Commerce Department keeps doing what it finds most terrifying (or fear-monger-ey) in Democratic campaign platforms: state ownership. I guess it’s counting on nobody noticing the naked hypocrisy, because the noticing has been outsourced to a top-rated cable news network that seems to have next to no interest in the job.
The sheer audacity at play here makes a mocking essay like this all too easy, but so too do the numbers. The Trump administration shakes down Nvidia and AMD for 15 percent of certain chip sales to China as the price of an export license, a toll no socialist city council would have the nerve to propose. The Pentagon is taking 40 percent of the venture building a smelter in Tennessee. Commerce put $2 billion on the table for minority stakes in nine quantum computing firms in a single May announcement.
Tad DeHaven at the libertarian Cato Institute has kept a running tally, and lists 30 companies that have closed letters of intent, dryly noting how government ownership has become “unremarkable.” That lands harder than any outrage could.
When a Democrat talks about the very municipal grocery stores that even Trump’s own cabinet members tout, well, it's used as a dire warning of Marxism at the gates of free trade! But when this White House uses its golden share in US Steel, which carries final say over plant closures, capital spending, and even the company’s name, to forbid a private company from shutting its own mill in Illinois? That’s putting America first! No economic theory on earth sorts the second as capitalism and the first as communism, but this is less about economic theory and more about bullshit political rhetoric that still, impossibly, plays.
Fox News has spent the better part of the past year staging a socialism panic around Zohran Mamdani and five city-run grocery stores in a city of eight million. At the same time, a Republican administration assembles actual state ownership in plain sight, which the same network has effectively ignored. Why? Well, the panic machine needs one enemy who can be othered, and a Republican government taking board-adjacent positions across 30 companies doesn’t fit the costume or neat narrative-friendly plot line.
The embarrassment cuts deepest for the people who spent decades writing the anti-communism catechism. Like the rarest of political breeds these days, the principled conservative Jonah Goldberg. He greeted the chip deals by gaming out what comes next: clawing back oil company profits for the common good and a “No Tax on Burrito” plan. He’s joking in the same way that people joke at a funeral, but the movement that defined itself against state ownership now watches its own party practice it at a frightening scale. On the other side, Democrats seem to stay quiet because half of them agree with the premise, and are too distracted by the rise of socialists in their own ranks to see a golden opportunity to hit the Trump administration. Sadly, the only sustained objections in American media live in a Cato spreadsheets and a Goldberg tweet. We’re screwed.
Even the Trump administration’s own boasting gives the game away. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described trade deals that let the president personally direct $550 billion in Japanese investment as other countries “in essence, providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.” Yes, he bragged about a sovereign wealth fund, which I can only imagine would not go over well with the founding fathers.
Maybe the most telling and bizarre part of it all? That the very same men warning you about communism are proudest of the part where the state owns the wealth.