All Empires tilt at windmills. Fleas are magnified into elephants. Existential threats are
summoned into being. President Donald Trump’s jousting against “communism” before the Faith
and Freedom Coalition on June 26, 2025 is exemplary.
But suppose Trump is invoking Communism as a shorthand for government control of
the economy and the handcuffing or eclipsing private enterprise commonly associated with
socialism. Mr. Trump himself, however, repeatedly acts indistinguishable from a Communist
Economic Czar. Remember Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He
coined the phrase "commanding heights"of the economy in 1922 to defend his New Economic
Policy. Lenin maintained that the state must retain control of strategically vital economic
sectors—like heavy industry, banking, energy, and foreign trade—to underwrite wider prosperity
and growth.
Is Trump any different?
He is actively exploring options to acquire equity stakes in major AI companies to
redistribute income derived from economic growth and entrepreneurship to all Americans. He
has voiced interest in a "partnership with the American public"; regarding AI profits, floating the
potential creation of a sovereign wealth fund, a euphemism for Soviet style GOSPLAN.
The Trump administration, guided by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has embarked on
an aggressive industrial policy that includes strategic equity stakes in imagined vital sectors,
including national security and critical supply chains.
Trump is targeting up to seven strategic sectors, including professedly indispensable minerals
(such as rare earths), semiconductors, steel, and aerospace. Trump’s administration has invested
in upstream defense and tech suppliers like MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, and emerging
quantum computing firms. President Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act to force
contractors to accelerate munitions production in response to depleted stockpiles. He has issued
executive orders ostensibly to modernize defense acquisitions and limit stock buybacks or
dividend payouts by contractors, aiming to ensure private capital is reinvested into
manufacturing capacity.
He negotiated government management of U.S. Steel as a condition of the latter’s
acquisition by Nippon Steel.
He had the U.S. Government take a 10 percent equity stake in Intel costing $8.9 billion.
In violation of the constitutional prohibition on export taxes, Mr. Trump has demanded 25
percent of Nvidia’s revenues as a condition of exporting semiconductors to China.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, gospel to the Founding Fathers, elaborated on the
economic lunacy of government interventions in private enterprise typified by Lenin and Trump.
Reflect on the timelessness of Smith’s perspicacity:
“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to
employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention but
assume an authority which could safely be entrusted, not only to no single person, but to
no council or senate whatsoever, and which would nowhere be more dangerous in the
hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise
it.:”
*Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general