What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Agree On
The president is rewriting the GOP’s economic playbook
Three years ago, as the Senate was debating the CHIPS and Science Act, two of the chamber’s most progressive members — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — teamed up to introduce a controversial amendment.
The bill included tens of billions of dollars in funding for domestic manufacturers of semiconductors, the tiny computer chips that power everything from your iPhone to your car. Sanders and Warren were proposing that firms be prohibited from receiving that support unless they offered the US government a stake in their company in exchange.
“If private companies are going to benefit from generous taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people, not just wealthy shareholders,” Sanders said on the Senate floor.
The idea didn’t gain any purchase among Democrats, who controlled Congress at the time. Then–President Joe Biden never embraced the proposal, and the amendment never received a vote.
Last week, a very different president turned Bernie Sanders’s dream into a reality, infusing $8.9 billion in funding (mostly from the CHIPS Act) into tech giant Intel in exchange for the US taking a 9.9% stake in the firm. The federal government is now Intel’s biggest shareholder. An idea that was too far left for Biden was embraced by Donald Trump.
Sanders was ecstatic, telling Punchbowl News that he was “glad the Trump Administration is in agreement with the amendment I offered three years ago.” Republicans were left privately confused, not just about the specifics of the move, but about what it said more broadly.
Can the GOP call itself the party of free markets if its leader is trying to partially nationalize a private company, taking economic advice from a democratic socialist?
The Republican Party has placed capitalism at the center of its platform for at least a century, since presidents like Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover rose to power with the support of business interests in the 1920s and ’30s.
“The United States government ought to keep from undertaking to transact business that the people themselves ought to transact,” Coolidge said in 1927, articulating a laissez-faire philosophy (one opposed to government intervention in the economy) that would grip the GOP for the next several generations.
“It is my policy,” he added, “in so far as I can, to keep the government out of business, withdraw from that business that it is engaged in temporarily, and not to be in favor of its embarking on new enterprises.”
This way of thinking perhaps reached its zenith during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
On paper, it might seem like Donald Trump would have been the perfect candidate to continue this philosophy. A multibillionaire who delights in gilded decorations and boasts a more extended business record than any previous president, Trump’s biography and tastes are as capitalist as they come.
But especially in his second term, he hasn’t governed like it.
In addition to taking a stake in Intel, Trump has immersed the government in other private companies, claiming veto power over decisions at US Steel and inking a revenue-sharing deal with Nvidia.
Despite accusing Kamala Harris of proposing “socialist price controls” during the campaign, Trump has threatened to punish companies if they raise their prices in response to tariffs.
He has called for the US to create a sovereign wealth fund, which would allow the government to further invest in companies, following in the footsteps of countries like Norway and China.
And his advisers have said more government takeovers could be in the offing, floating the idea of Uncle Sam taking stakes in companies from TikTok to Boeing. (“China does it every single day,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick noted, openly drawing a comparison with a country that owns or partially owns more than 800,000 businesses.) “I will make deals like that for our Country all day long,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Instead of embracing a separation between government and business, with the traditional Republican belief that free markets lead to economic strength, Trump has sought to commingle industry and the state — and he has been clear about which should be in charge.
In the context of tariffs, Trump has compared the American economy to “the biggest department store in history.” And, using language that sounds more like Karl Marx than Adam Smith, he added, “On behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”
That’s a far cry from the days of Hoover, when the Republican president said that the economy should be governed by “the producers and consumers themselves,” not “legislative action or executive pronouncement.” Trump’s move on Monday to fire a governor of the Federal Reserve, threatening the independence of America’s central bank, represents another effort to impose his will over the economy.
So, is Trump a capitalist? A socialist? A statist? A MAGA Maoist?
It is pointless trying to assign an economic philosophy to Trump, who mixes the passage of Reaganesque tax cuts with support for a (sometimes) Sandersesque level of federal command over the economy, and moves to take a public stake in major companies while simultaneously trying to privatize Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the US Postal Service.
Instead of adopting a coherent ideology, he swerves with the moment: trying to assert dominance over industries that interest him and shedding public entities that do not; seeking to appease CEOs with lower taxes while also bullying them into keeping certain prices.
Wall Street executives hoped that Trump’s corporate experience had ingrained in him the idea that government should stay out of business, making him their natural ally. But, if anything, his background has seemed to push him in the other direction, less because of any abiding ideology than because he appears to miss having a hand in the business world and lacks any philosophical qualms about doing so from the White House.
With Sanders as a foil, Trump has railed against communism during all three of his presidential campaigns — but rarely expressed a particular affinity for capitalism. Tellingly, one of the only times he mentioned free markets in his first campaign, it was to scorn them.
“Some conservatives would say, ‘That’s not free market,’” Trump acknowledged in 2016, referring to his trade policy. “I mean, we’re losing our shirts, folks. We’re losing our jobs. We don’t have a choice.”
The result is a Republican Party without much of a core economic agenda beyond Trump’s changing whims.
Trump isn’t the first conservative president to flirt with a different economic model. Back in the 1970s, Republican Richard Nixon briefly experimented with imposing temporary wage and price controls, in a bid to reduce inflation.
The policy was popular for a little bit, but ultimately was deemed a political and economic loser. That led to a period of competition within the GOP; Reagan’s model, a return to free market orthodoxy, would eventually win out.
It is difficult to know whether the post-Trump GOP will go in the same direction, partially because so many Republican leaders are remaining quiet about the president’s moves now.
I started with a long-forgotten congressional proposal, so I’ll end with one too.
Not so long ago, GOP leaders often mocked the Obama administration for picking “winners and losers” in the economy, citing the failed Solyndra loan and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout (passed under George W. Bush, though with more Democratic than Republican support), which saw the government purchase shares of banks like AIG.
In 2009, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota introduced a bill that would have required the federal government to sell off the interests it had purchased in private companies.
“Economic competition is like sports,” Thune wrote at the time, “with teams competing against each other using agreed upon rules. The government should act as the referee, ensuring that the rules are followed and enforcing penalties when they are not. However, if the government takes an ownership stake in a company, it can no longer be expected to enforce the rules fairly, because simultaneously being a ‘player’ in the game compromises the whole system.”
“If our nation continues down this dangerous path,” Thune added, “the president will be the de facto CEO of more and more segments of the economy, with Congress behaving like a 535-member board of directors. Every business decision will be viewed through an added political lens, putting even more taxpayer money in jeopardy.”
Thune is now the Senate majority leader, which gives him the perfect opportunity to assert his economic beliefs as Trump adopts Sanders’s old proposal, not his. But days after it was announced, the top Republican senator has yet to comment on the Intel deal.
Maybe Thune was half right: the president is, in fact, trying to act as a CEO, just as Thune predicted. But he doesn’t see much of a need to run his decisions past Congress or any other board of directors. And, so far, Republican lawmakers seem in no rush to make him.
 | A guest post by
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I do not understand why anyone would think President Trump’s business experience is a good thing. Every time someone refers to him as a businessman, they should include the word failed. He is a failed businessman. He is a bankrupted businessman. He is a convicted felon businessman. He is a businessman like Bernie Madoff, not Bernie Sanders.
Gabe, you are looking for a business philosophy from a con man. His only business philosophy is “what’s in it for me?”
Yes. Thank you Gabe for making this contradiction so easy to see.
In my POV, this opens up a campaign message for Democrats heading into the next election cycle. How can Republicans continue to weaponize “communist” or “socialist” as slurs when the very policies these accusations were meant to attack are now the defining economic features of the Republican Party under Trump? The government taking equity stakes in private companies, threatening price controls, comparing America to a state-run department store - these were the exact “nightmares” conservatives warned about for decades, and now they’re being implemented by their own standard-bearer without internal dissent.
Democrats should flip the script entirely and start using these same terms against the incumbent administration, but with a crucial twist. They can argue that some degree of socialism has been woven into America’s fabric since its founding - from public schools to Social Security to the interstate highway system - and when employed intelligently and compassionately, it actually serves the interests of the public rather than just satisfying a narcissist’s whims for power. The difference isn’t whether government intervenes in the economy, but how and why. Democrats could make the case for fewer corporate tax breaks and arbitrary price controls, and instead champion a stronger social safety net and strategic investments in areas that pay for themselves over time. Less frivolous spending on theatrical detention facilities and re-renaming military bases to honor the confederate generals they used to be named after, more investment in education and healthcare to raise a generation of innovators who can actually compete in the global economy. But first, that new generation needs access to high speed internet, well-funded schools, and vaccines.
I doubt the Republican Party will maintain this economic direction after Trump leaves office. The party seems primarily motivated by mafia-like fear of retaliation from the president for speaking against his message rather than any genuine ideological conversion. Once whatever is happening to Trump’s body finally puts an end to his political career, we’ll inevitably see politicians claiming to be his successor and inheritor of his movement. But because there’s no ideological continuity even within his current policies - simultaneously nationalizing companies while privatizing the postal service, imposing tariffs while cutting corporate taxes - I cannot imagine this embrace of what amounts to selective communism being inherited wholesale by the next narcissist who takes the reins. Trump’s economic philosophy is less a coherent worldview and more a collection of impulses centered around personal dominance and transactional thinking.
But while he’s here and wielding power with the full acquiescence of his party, Democrats might as well embrace the contradiction as a campaign message. Point out that Republicans are now the party of government ownership stakes, price controls, and state-directed capitalism. Then offer voters a choice: would they rather have these interventionist policies directed by someone’s personal whims and vendettas, or would they prefer strategic government action guided by actual public benefit? The old ideological battle lines have been completely scrambled, and Democrats would be foolish not to take advantage of this rhetorical gift that Trump and his enablers have handed them.