- calendar_today August 23, 2025
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After President Donald Trump ordered a 10% stake in the financially struggling American chipmaker Intel, the federal government has become Intel’s largest shareholder. The president has long staked his political career on traditional Republican economic ideas, and so this deal has come as a shock to many conservatives who normally support the president.
But instead of apologizing for this government intervention, Trump is doubling down. He has insisted this was an investment, not a bailout, and a “great deal for the United States, which will make our country richer and richer.” The president has even signaled that Intel is just the beginning: “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it,” Trump said in an interview. “This is the start of a new period that’s called industrial policy.”
What, then, is the threshold for socialism? For at least the past century, socialism has partly meant that the government owns the “means of production” to benefit all of society. By that metric, Trump hasn’t done much differently than China or Russia.
The case has also proved deeply ironic from a political standpoint. When Barack Obama moved to seize control of Chrysler and General Motors during the 2008–2009 financial crisis, conservatives accepted it as an emergency move that avoided the total liquidation of two American icons. “Had the federal government not intervened at this late date, it is extremely unlikely that any new entity would have emerged from the bankruptcy filing of either GM or Chrysler,” Wall Street Journal columnist and leading conservative David Rubin wrote at the time. Had Obama instead taken a 10% stake in Intel, Trump allies insist, the conservative media would have called him a communist.
Trump is trying to distinguish this case, which he has characterized as an investment rather than a bailout. The president said he transformed nearly $9 billion in grants — money that the company had already been promised under President Joe Biden’s bipartisan Chips Act — into equity for the U.S. government, with the government therefore generating $10 billion to $11 billion in value on day one. “Why are ‘stupid’ people unhappy with that?” the president asked.
Prominent conservatives have not hesitated to speak out against Trump. Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former top economic adviser, said on Fox Business that he was “very, very uncomfortable with that idea.” Steve Moore, another informal Trump adviser, was more blunt: “I hate corporate welfare. That’s privatization in reverse. We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets. So terrible, one of the bad ideas that’s come out of this White House.”
Editorials in National Review urged Trump to reconsider, warning “government shouldn’t get into the chip business.” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) sounded the alarm that the deal could “end up becoming a semi-state-owned enterprise a la CCCP,” referring to the former Soviet Union. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) drove the point home on social media: “Wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea.”
Bernie Sanders was celebrating the move and called on other progressives to do the same. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick rushed to the president’s defense, telling Laura Ingraham that “That is not socialism. That’s the best businessman in the United States of America in the Oval Office doing fair things for us.”
Intel, for its part, has made clear that the deal will not be without its costs. The company’s mandatory filing with the SEC included a warning that the arrangement could decrease Intel’s ability to obtain future government grants and assistance, negatively impact global sales, and subject its operations to increased regulation. Intel has been struggling for some time. The company announced in February that it was laying off 15% of its workforce, and its market capitalization has fallen to around $110 billion at present, down 50% since the start of 2024, though shares of the company rose 4% in the immediate wake of Trump’s announcement.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump initially tried to force Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign over past investments in China, but relented after meeting with him personally in the White House. “I liked him a lot, I thought he was very good,” Trump said.
If Trump can succeed in making sure the U.S. government does not intervene in Intel’s operations, it will be difficult to argue that this is socialism. But that may be the problem: when the president of the United States is a company’s single largest shareholder, the idea that he will not wield influence is itself a leap of faith.
Intel will likely have a new CEO before too long, and if the company recovers, Trump can take the credit for saving a foundational pillar of American technology. If it continues to lose money, taxpayers will. Trump has said he will do more of these deals, so the question of whether this is socialism, capitalism, or just Trumpism will become even more pertinent.
At the very least, Trump’s stake in Intel is a shift in the relationship between the federal government and the private sector, and a sign of how Trump has upended the Republican Party’s long-held economic orthodoxy.
