The tables were turned on US President Donald Trump on Monday when he was asked whether his demand for Intel to give the US government a 10 per cent equity stake amounted to a communist intervention in free markets. Mr Trump often calls his political opponents communists.
“During the campaign, you called Kamala Harris a communist, but the Biden-Harris administration, they never called for nationalising a private company with the federal government,” a reporter told Mr Trump in the Oval Office.
The President interrupted the question and vigorously defended the federal government's equity stake in the struggling chip maker.
“It's not a shame, it's called business,” Mr Trump said. He said he hoped there would be more instances of the US government taking ownership stakes in companies during his administration.
“I will tell you with a company like Intel, as you know, it's had difficulty," he added. "I want them to do well anyway, but now I want them to do particularly well."
Rick Stengel, former president Barack Obama's undersecretary of state, posted on BlueSky: “Trump's strong-arming Intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of."
He called the Intel equity stake shakedown capitalism, among other things.
“Once, the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector … look it up: the state owning the means of production is called Marxism,” Mr Stengel said.
The US government has taken a stake in companies before. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration took a stake in beleaguered General Motors as part of a bailout plan.
A statement at the time described the federal government as a “reluctant equity owner” as well as a “careful steward of taxpayer resources”.
Details of the arrangement also made sure that the equity ownership had an end date.
Mr Trump's dealings with Intel are a sharp departure from the Republican Party's overall stance on capitalism and private ownership.
In 2008, prominent Republican and later presidential nominee Mitt Romney opposed the US government taking a stake in GM.
“Let Detroit go bankrupt,” Mr Romney wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
On Monday in the White House, Mr Trump made it clear that he had no qualms about the US government having an equity stake in private corporations. “I invested my heart in it and my soul in it because I want the country to be strong,” he said. “It's very good for Intel.”
Mark MacCarthy, a senior fellow at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown Law in Washington, said there's definitely a double-standard at play, with President Trump not bearing as much of a brunt with the Marxism label.
"If it were done by a Democratic president, it would be called socialism," he explained, adding that all labels aside, the Intel investment isn't exactly a novelty.
"It only makes sense for the US to take a stake in a company that it is bailing out because of its crucial importance for national security," he said.
Semiconductor strategy
Mohammed Soliman, a strategy adviser at McLarty Associates, a Washington company specialising in private-sector diplomacy, said the Intel deal shows a rapid change in US industrial policy and tactics.
“Washington’s 10 per cent investment in Intel shows just how far we’ve moved from laissez-faire to active ownership,” Mr Soliman said.
Mr Soliman also explained that the Intel deal is not the only recent investment development related to the US government. He spoke of the $400 million federal investment in MP Materials, a rare-earth production company, “in exchange for preferred stocks".
Mr Soliman said the US is making a clear statement that it wants to dominate semiconductor production to continue its current lead against China.
“The government is no longer just regulating or subsidising, it is now financially and strategically embedded in the companies that anchor national power, from chips to rare earths and beyond,” he added.
