As last week got underway, Donald Trump used his social media platform to take swipe at, of all people, communists. “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years!” the president wrote for reasons that were unclear. “But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL!”
With this rhetorical question still rattling around the algorithm, it was rather ironic to see the Republican end the week calling for a government stake in yet another private industry. The New York Times reported:
President Trump told reporters on Friday that he would soon meet with artificial intelligence companies to discuss partnerships that would give the United States government a stake in the burgeoning industry.
“There’s so much money and it’s so big,” Trump said, according to a pool report from his flight to Wisconsin on Air Force One. Trump added that in the deals he envisions “the American public essentially becomes a partner” in the growth of A.I.
Asked which private AI companies he was eyeing, the president replied, “All of them. All the big ones.”
The comment came just days after independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, wrote an opinion piece for the Times touting a congressional proposal he had introduced that would “give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country.” The proposal was predictably panned soon after by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal as “the road to AI state socialism.”
It was around this same time that Trump not only endorsed the same idea, he also told reporters that there was some overlap between his economic vision and the Vermont socialist’s.
Trump: Bernie Sanders lost, you know that I got many of his people — they voted for me. Because, as far as economics is concerned, we have certain things that are not that far apart pic.twitter.com/ZMaks3WS2Z
The debate can and should continue about the merits of such a policy, but it’s hard not to notice the familiarity of the circumstances. On the one hand, Trump seems to like condemning those who disagree with him as communists. On the other hand, he also seems oddly interested in having the government taking ownership of parts of a variety of private industries.
In fact, late last year, after the government became the largest shareholder in a company developing extreme ultraviolet lithography tools that are seen as key to the development of semiconductors, my MS NOW colleague Ja’han Jones noted that this extended the Republican administration’s “socialist — if not blatantly authoritarian — trend of making the government a stakeholder in supposed ‘free market’ enterprises.”
Indeed, Jones added, “This trend stands in clear contrast with an administration that publicly decries socialism and a conservative movement that has labeled things like free buses and government-owned grocery stores as anathema to private industry and the American way of life.”
There’s no reason to assume the list won’t keep growing. The president, by his own admission, isn’t eyeing stakes only in AI companies, he and his team have also raised the prospect of seeking ownership stakes in oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and, in one recent instance, the rare-earth metals industry.
This is the same Republican president who’s also spoken publicly about limiting private companies’ profits, dictating private industries’ prices and cutting salaries for some private sector executives.
The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip published a provocative analysis on this last summer, noting that Trump’s vision doesn’t quite constitute “socialism,” because it more closely resembles “state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”
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