by Andrew Stanton, Newsweek, Aug. 26, 2025- President Donald Trump's deal with Intel that would give the federal government a 10 percent stake in the company sparked pushback from at least two Republican senators this week.
A White House spokesperson responded to these concerns in a statement to Newsweek, writing that the administration is "ensuring that taxpayers are able to reap the upside of the federal government's investments into safeguarding our national and economic security."
Trump announced the deal with Intel, a computer chip-producing company that has struggled in recent years, last week. It is a rare, but not unprecedented, instance of government intervention into a private business from a Republican administration and marks a shift from typical conservative economic orthodoxy.
The deal is intended to boost Intel, which has faced challenges following years of missteps, reported the Associated Press. But not all Republicans are comfortable with the deal, underscoring tension between Trump and more traditional fiscal conservatives.
What To Know
Trump announced the deal in an August 22 Truth Social post. "The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars. This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL. Building leading edge Semiconductors and Chips, which is what INTEL does, is fundamental to the future of our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter," he wrote in the post.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican known as a fiscal conservative, criticized the deal on X.
"If socialism is government owning the means of production, wouldn't the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea," Paul wrote.
Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, also raised concerns about the deal in an interview with journalist Major Garrett.
"I don't care if it's a dollar or a billion dollar stake," Tillis said. "That starts feeling like a semi-state owned enterprise, à la CCCP. I don't believe that the U.S. government should be picking winners and losers because you won't always be right."
He questioned how this "reconciles with true conservatism and true free market capitalism."
"Does anybody really believe that any opinion except the opinion of the administration is really going to matter in boardroom discussions going forward?" he said. (read more)
By David A. Graham, August 25, 2025- “The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared 29 years ago. Donald Trump never got the memo.
In his second term, the president is embracing perhaps the most sweeping expansion of federal power since that of Franklin D. Roosevelt: bullying state governments, using military force if necessary; telling private institutions, including media corporations and universities, how to operate; extorting law firms into doing free work for the government; and, in the latest escalation, taking a stake in the tech firm Intel.
Conservative pundits and trolls have long used socialist as a ready-made epithet for any left-of-center policy ideas. Trump himself even called Kamala Harris a “communist” during the 2024 campaign. But Trump is offering proof that a government can be both socialist and reactionary.
... As Wall Street Journal reporting indicates, this was more of a protection racket than a business deal. ...This is just the nightmare that right-wing politicians and thinkers have been warning about for a century, and now their party has made it reality. The era of small government is over. (read it all)
Trump's Intel Deal Is Corporate Socialism in a MAGA Hat
by Joe Lancaster Reason, August 25, 2025 - President Donald Trump negotiated a deal last week for the U.S. government to take a substantial ownership stake in an American company. Despite his assurances, Trump's socialistic transaction is a terrible deal not only for the parties involved, but for the entire U.S. economy. ...
Every part of this transaction flies in the face of any sincere interpretation of free markets, including the Biden administration's original sin to approve billions of dollars for a struggling company. It is perhaps telling that as Reason's Eric Boehm noted last week, the idea that the U.S. government should take a piece of Intel in exchange for CHIPS Act funding was first floated by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Trump and his allies are now issuing talking points that could have come from the socialist senator himself.
If the U.S. government insists upon dishing out taxpayer money to private companies, is there any reason it shouldn't, as U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick put it to CNBC, get "a piece of the action"?
There are many reasons, in fact. "The most immediate risk is that Intel's decisions will increasingly be driven by political rather than commercial considerations," (read it all)
byNick Catoggio, Published August 25, 2025 ... They told me that if I voted for Kamala Harris we’d end up with a command-and-control economy. And they were right....
The president is enough of a socialist to have received a round of applause for his Intel deal from America’s most prominent pinko, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
And he’s enough of a socialist to have roused normally docile conservatives to condemn the Intel news harshly, including a few Reaganite economists who long ago made their peace with Trumpism in other respects. “I hate corporate welfare. That’s privatization in reverse. We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets,” said Stephen Moore, whom the president once nominated for a seat at the Fed, on Fox Business. “I am very, very uncomfortable with that idea,” host Larry Kudlow agreed—before quickly moving on.
The Intel squeeze is socialist-ist, if that makes sense. But it’s not socialist.
Socialism is an economic theory that prioritizes wealth equality over wealth creation. It calls for the state to control the means of production on behalf of the great working-stiff majority, to ensure that they receive more of the fruits of their labor than rapacious private owners would be willing to share under capitalism.
Putting the state in charge of industry leads to all sorts of funny quirks. Markets grow distorted and inefficient as the government intervenes, slowing growth and producing shortages. The rapacious bourgeoisie gives way to a more rapacious class of racketeering bureaucrats eager to use their new power to enrich their friends and punish their enemies. Government coercion, up to and including mass violence, replaces the profit motive as the primary tool for inducing behavior.
It’s a real peach. And socialism’s theory of how to achieve the greatest good, by devolving wealth from the top of society to the desperate bottom, usually ends up producing greater desperation across all classes rather than greater prosperity. (That’s equality of a sort.) But it does at least have a theory of civic virtue behind it. It’s possible to be a well-meaning socialist, especially if you don’t know a thing about the history of socialism.
There’s no similarly altruistic “theory” behind what Trump is doing with Intel and other companies. (read it all)
US Senator Sanders favors Trump plan to take stake in Intel and other chipmakers
I am not shocked that Trump would do this. I don't think Trump could do anything that would shock me anymore. I think he has no core convictions. Everything is transactional and about power. I am pleased that this has met resistance. However, I suspect that most of Trump's supporters will not care. On issue after issue, Trump supporters have abandoned long-cherished beliefs and values. Trump can do a one-eighty, and his followers will follow until the next one-eighty. If Trump is a socialist, well, don't you know, socialism is a good thing. It makes one's head spin.
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