Trump’s Right-Wing Socialism

By David A. Graham

Monday, August 25, 2025

 

“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared 29 years ago. Donald Trump never got the memo.

 

In his second term, the president is embracing perhaps the most sweeping expansion of federal power since that of Franklin D. Roosevelt: bullying state governments, using military force if necessary; telling private institutions, including media corporations and universities, how to operate; extorting law firms into doing free work for the government; and, in the latest escalation, taking a stake in the tech firm Intel.

 

For decades, the American right and the Republican Party held themselves up as the defenders of individual citizens, corporations, and state and local governments against intrusive control from Washington. But where Ronald Reagan joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were I’m from the government, and I’m here to help, Trump’s credo is “I’m from the government, and I’m here to take over.” The debate in America is no longer about whether socialism can gain a foothold. It’s whether the socialism that dominates will be progressive or right-wing.

 

Conservative pundits and trolls have long used socialist as a ready-made epithet for any left-of-center policy ideas. Trump himself even called Kamala Harris a “communist” during the 2024 campaign. But Trump is offering proof that a government can be both socialist and reactionary. As recently as 2016, the right-wing writer Michael Anton argued in favor of a Trump presidency by warning of “the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions.” Today, that’s a pretty good description of Trump’s approach to power. (Anton now serves in Trump’s State Department.)

 

Last week, the Trump administration announced that the government was taking a 10 percent stake in Intel. This would be remarkable enough on its own: The federal government doesn’t usually take stakes in any companies, except in cases of imminent collapse that endanger the national economy. Yet the circumstances of this case were even more shocking. As Wall Street Journal reporting indicates, this was more of a protection racket than a business deal. First, the announcement came after the president demanded that Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, resign over past business dealings with the Chinese military. Second, the stake was “bought” with $8.9 billion already promised to Intel as grants under a 2022 law passed by Congress. (If Tan’s ties to China were really a national-security threat, going into business with him would be a curious choice.)

 

Speaking with reporters today, Trump agreed that his action is a form of industrial policy. When the Biden administration adopted this approach, in which government is more closely involved with private businesses, Republicans and conservatives attacked it as socialist. The top economic adviser Kevin Hassett says more investments will come soon.

 

The self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is, in a rare case of agreement with Trump, on board with the Intel deal, but the arrangement has enraged some Trump allies. “This is actual socialism happening by a Republican administration,” Erick Erickson, the veteran conservative commentator, fulminated. “You may be comfortable with socialism. You may decide you like socialism, because someone from the Trump administration wants socialism, but my God, people, what have we been fighting for for the last decade?”

 

Fair question—except that this is hardly a major divergence from Trump’s modus operandi. Over the weekend, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson responded with verbal jousts to Trump’s threats to federalize National Guard forces (over the governors’ objections) and send them to Chicago, and Baltimore, following his militarization of Washington, D.C. Trump has still not laid out what the goal of these actions is, short of vaguely enforcing order, nor when they should stop, nor why the National Guard is suited to them. But conservatives have traditionally been very uncomfortable with this kind of federal intrusion on states, even in far more justifiable cases, such as enforcing desegregation.

 

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to force states to stop using mail-in ballots, which he falsely claims are linked to fraud, a notion fed to him recently by the notorious election thief Vladimir Putin. As Barton Gellman wrote in The New York Times, this is an astonishing attempted grab of power over elections. The Constitution vests control of elections with Congress or the states, not the president. Some Republicans even objected when the Obama administration tried to set up cybersecurity assistance for election systems, but few are questioning Trump today. At the same time, he is trying to depose a Federal Reserve governor so that he can exert more control over monetary policy.

 

These are attempts to expand the federal government’s reach within the public sector; more unusual still are the incursions into private enterprises. The Intel stake is only the most recent and most expansive. Trump strong-armed law firms into agreements in which they’re reportedly doing free work to boost his agenda. Last night, he threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses for NBC and ABC stations—omitting CBS, which already knuckled under to him—in his latest attack on free speech and attempt to force the press to cover him positively. Not content to merely police universities’ use of affirmative action or potential civil-rights violations, the federal government has effectively fired a university president and is trying to control what curricula they can teach and dictate what students they can and cannot admit. Trump is even trying to tell the National Baseball Hall of Fame whom it should enshrine.

 

Paradoxically, Trump is also shrinking the federal government’s footprint, as measured by headcount and agencies. He’s closed or sought to shut down USAID, the Education Department, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and has fired or bought out hundreds of thousands of federal employees; the exact number is difficult to know because of unresolved litigation and the administration’s opacity. Yet even as he shrinks the size of the government, he is expanding its role into new and unprecedented areas. And the pace of government spending continues to rise, in part because of ill-conceived “efficiency” cuts.

 

The result is a government that is less effective at providing services, more expensive, and more intrusive. This is just the nightmare that right-wing politicians and thinkers have been warning about for a century, and now their party has made it reality. The era of small government is over.