What did Donald Trump do today?

He extorted a major American company for 10% of its value to make his "national security" concerns disappear.

A few weeks ago, Trump said that the CEO of Intel, the only major American manufacturer of computer chips, was "highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately," adding that "there is no other solution to this problem."

The "conflict" that Trump was talking about appears to be that the CEO, Lip-bu Tan, is ethnically Chinese, although he was born and raised in Singapore. Tan has connections to Chinese-owned businesses, but then so does almost anyone in the semiconductor industry.

Today, Trump sang a different tune, calling Tan "Highly Respected." Nothing has changed except that Intel agreed to sell 10% of its stock to the United States, apparently to get Trump to stop attacking them. 

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump claimed that the United States had paid nothing for the stock, but that's a lie. In reality, the money for the sale came from funds that had been set aside to help Intel stay competitive in the semiconductor industry—which was a major national security priority of the Biden Administration. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created research and development subsidies for Intel and other American computer companies. Instead of receiving those funds, Intel is now treating them as cash for the purchase of its stock by the government.

In other words, what Trump has done is claw back a major American investment in its computer industry, while at the same time admitting that he can be convinced to ignore "national security concerns" for the right price.

Trump recently arranged for a similar forced sale when he permitted the acquisition of US Steel by a Japanese company, although in that case, it was for a voting share in management rather than stock. He's also made specific demands of companies he hasn't tried to seize control over. These have ranged from the ridiculous (insisting that Coca-Cola change its recipe) to the sinister (trying to get a Goldman Sachs executive fired for pointing out the economic damage Trump's tariffs are doing). 

This kind of involuntary nationalization through direct government control of private corporations is called a command economy, and it has been tried before, for example by the Soviet Union.
 

Why does this matter?

• You can have capitalism, or you can have predatory governments extorting businesses, but not both at the same time.

• The computer chip industry is extremely important, so deliberately weakening the United States' biggest player is a pretty bad idea. 

• It's bad if the President of the United States is only pretending to care about national security.