MAGA GOP Keeps Taking Ownership Stakes In Private Companies, Then Warning You The Communists Are Coming

from the oh-no-communists dept

Words used to mean things. The MAGA GOP strategy lately seems to be pulling a page from the 1980s playbook (a Trump specialty) and declaring anyone they don’t like to be “communist.” The whole thing is laughable. Even if you disagree with some of the policy positions of far left groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (and they do have some wacky, nonsensical things on their platform) they are (1) not even remotely close to communism and (2) have zero chance of actually being put into policy.

But, really, so much of it seems to be projection. Former UBS CEO and regular Fox News contributor Robert Wolf went on that network earlier this week, where the host clearly expected him to trash Mayor Mamdani’s proposals in NYC as communist. Wolf seemed to surprise the host by pointing out that the only real activity that seemed communistic was coming from the Trump White House.

“Let me reverse this a little. If Mayor Mamdani did the following: if he put price controls on products like pharmaceuticals, if he bailed out farmers, if he took private stakes in public companies, if he said to energy companies ‘you’re making too much money,’ if he proposed credit card caps, you would all go apoplectic, as would your viewers. That’s what President Trump’s doing. You could argue he’s the most powerful socialist in the country today.”

When the host finally comes back in, she laughs nervously and says “I’ll have to think about that, Robert,” before quickly changing the subject. Wolf gets in a final: “Well, all those five points I made, he did, the President, so…” The host then immediately… goes back to claiming that Democrats are going to destroy NYC with socialism, without ever addressing a single one of Wolf’s five points about Trump’s actual “socialistic” tendencies.

Meanwhile the left wingers over at [checks notes…] the Cato Institute, are pointing out that the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies has become “routine”.

Since December, the CHIPS Research and Development (R&D) Office has announced 19 final or proposed company awards totaling up to $3.8 billion. They cover 18 companies because GlobalFoundries has two separate projects. Three agreements are final, while 16 remain letters of intent. All 19 have been publicly tied to equity.

Commerce’s current funding rules state that award recipients may be required to provide equity, warrants, intellectual property licenses, royalties, revenue sharing, or other instruments to generate a government return. The Biden administration, by contrast, used the same CHIPS R&D appropriation through separate competitions to award funds to private companies without taking ownership stakes. That makes the Trump administration’s insistence on equity a policy choice. The CHIPS Act itself authorizes Commerce to make grants, cooperative agreements, and “other transactions” but doesn’t expressly authorize the department to acquire stock. 

Last time around, you’ll recall, Trump and MAGA also tried to make out Biden as a far left “communist.” Yet, given the chance he didn’t setup the apparatus for government ownership of private companies. Trump is now using the law passed under Biden’s guidance, which didn’t require ownership stakes, and using it that way. Which one is more of a communist?

We’ve talked a little about this before, with regards to Trump taking an equity stake in Intel and getting a golden share in US Steel. But in any other administration — especially a Democratic one — the business press and Republicans would be up in arms over so much government ownership of private companies.

This is the opposite of free market capitalism. It’s the government picking winners and losers, and then demanding a cut of the winnings for doing it. Even if the bets work out (and Trump keeps hyping up how successful the Intel investment has been), it’s still the sorta thing that is fundamentally against the principles of free markets. Hell, when the Obama administration merely guaranteed a loan to Solyndra — no equity, no ownership, no board seat, just a loan guarantee — it became an albatross Republicans hung around his neck for the better part of a decade.

Here, as Cato notes, Trump is normalizing the US government taking significant ownership stakes in private companies:

A year ago, these deals looked like a scattered series of one-off improvisations. Commerce now announces companies in batches and openly describes a “portfolio approach.” As I argued in a December 2025 essay, the administration has been assembling a pseudo-sovereign wealth fund under executive control, one deal at a time.

The latest six companies are not especially remarkable. What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute. 

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

And don’t sleep on the bit buried at the end of that second paragraph: the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to write more of this into the NDAA and hand the Pentagon its own equity portfolio with which to further nationalize and take equity stakes in more companies. A president doing weird one-off deals is one thing. But now we’re having Republicans literally build into the law the machinery of government ownership of private companies.

And they want you to believe the other guys are communists?

Every Republican currently warning that the communists are coming to take over American business might want to consider what they’re actually building here. They’re the ones picking winners and losers. They’re the ones normalizing the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies. They’re the ones putting into law that this is to be expected.

So then, when Democrats eventually get back in power, it will have been the GOP that handed them the tools for government ownership of companies. It’s difficult to see how the GOP can whine about “communism” while building the fundamental infrastructure to enable the government to nationalize industry.

“Socialism” and “communism” are just bogeymen at this point, words deployed to scare people away from voting for Democrats — because the alternative is running on their actual record, we can all see how that’s going.

Filed Under: chips act, communism, dod, donald trump, equity stakes, gop, nationalization, ndaa, private companies