Re: [Salon] TRUMP TILTING AT WINDMILLS AGAIN

[Warren Coats <wcoats@gmail.com>]

Bruce. I would like to share this. Please prove a link
Warren Coats
1211 S Eads St. Apt 2101
Arlington Va. 22202
(703) 608-2975 
https://wcoats.blog

> On Jul 12, 2026, at 10:07 AM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> TRUMP TILTING AT WINDMILLS AGAIN
> 
> By Bruce Fein*
> 
> 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.
> 
> Mr. Trump trumpeted, “We have to stop this, this horrible threat of cancer that’s
> permeating our country called communism.”
> 
> “Communism?” It breathed its last gasp 35 years ago with the dissolution of the Soviet
> Union in 1991. China ended its flirtation with Communism with the death of Chairman Mao in
> 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The latter has been a victim of Mao’s mad Cultural
> Revolution. He famously sermonized, “To get rich is glorious,” and “It doesn’t matter if a cat is
> black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
> 
> The number of active Communists in the United States approximates 11,000, an
> infinitesimal fraction of the population. There are zero members of the Communist Party of the
> United States of America holding electoral office. Is there a single American who sleeps
> worried that Communists will soon be dominating the corridors of power?
> 
> 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
> --
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