While Accusing Dems Of Communism, Trump Is Establishing A National Socialism

The following post is from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

Quietly and without any fanfare, the Trump regime is becoming a shareholder or profit-sharer in an array of corporations thought to be critical to the nation’s security. 

For example, in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history, the U.S. chipmaker Intel’s shares have more than quadrupled in value since March 2025. The stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion. 

A year ago, Intel was on life support. Many predicted its death. What happened?Intel’s rebirth is partly due to the AI boom, which requires huge quantities of computer chips known as CPUs, which are Intel’s specialty. 

But a far larger factor in Intel’s stunning resurgence has been the Trump regime’s direct interventions — not only into Intel but also into other tech corporations: Apple and the giant super-chip maker Nvidia. 

The Trump regime has justified this on grounds of national security. But it’s socialism because the downside risks are broadly shared by the public.

 

Yet the upside the benefits go to the U.S. government and to top corporate investors and executives.

 

And it further centralizes power and control over key industries in Trump’s hands. 

Call it national socialism. 

In August 2025 — in one of the most audacious moves by any administration — the U.S. government converted $9 billion in federal grants to Intel into a 10 percent stake in the company, thereby becoming Intel’s single largest shareholder.

 

Can you imagine if the Obama administration had converted its bailouts of Wall Street, GM, and Stellantis into equity stakes in the big banks and automakers? Republicans would have been on rooftops hollering: Socialism! Communism!

 

But the Trump regime did the deal without so much as a Republican peep. 

At about the same time, Apple CEO Tim Cook came to Washington, seeking to persuade the Trump regime to abandon its plan to impose tariffs of 100 percent on all semiconductor imports. The tariffs would have dramatically increased the cost of Apple’s iPhone and other products, which relied on imported semiconductors.

 

Apple eventually won an exemption to the semiconductor tariff, on one condition: Apple would work with Intel — it would commit to buying from Intel certain chips used for iPhones and Macs, use Intel’s manufacturing plants (or fabs) to make some of Apple’s chips, and collaborate with Intel on chip design and production. 

Then in January, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, came to Washington seeking the Trump regime’s approval for Nvidia’s sales to China of its H200 chip for artificial intelligence. 

Huang was desperate to get access to China’s giant and potentially lucrative market, but the sale would require an exemption to America’s policy of not selling or licensing to the Chinese our advanced AI technology, to minimize any risk to U.S. security.

Huang got what he was after, after agreeing to two conditions. First, the United States government would get 25 percent of all profits from Nvidia’s sales in China. Second, Nvidia would invest $5 billion in Intel and buy its custom data center chips. Huang called the deal a “historic” partnership.

This isn’t capitalism, folks. It’s government becoming the major shareholder of the biggest chip-making in America, then giving a tariff exemption to another key tech corporation on condition it buy the products of and collaborate with the first, and giving a national-security exemption to a third key tech company on condition it also buy the products of the first and give the government a portion of its sales in China. 

And who the hell knows what Trump and Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce who spearheaded these deals, grabbed for themselves or their families along the way?

 

Trump’s national socialism doesn’t stop here. Under Trump, the U.S. government has also become the largest shareholder of MP Materials, which operates the only mine for rare earth minerals in the United States, after sinking $400 million of taxpayer dollars into the corporation. 

And when Nippon Steel acquired U.S. Steel in June of 2025, it was announced that Trump would personally control the so-called “golden share” that his regime forced U.S. Steel to accept as part of the deal. 

It’s ironic that Trump is berating the Democrats for electing and nominating a group of young people who call themselves democratic socialists when he’s been shifting the United States to national socialism. 

Doubly ironic because Trump’s national socialism is making fortunes for a small group of top executives who were already fabulously wealthy, while the democratic socialists in the Democratic Party want to tax the wealthy to provide funds for better schools, better wages, and healthcare for all.

 

And Trump’s national socialism is concentrating ever more power in Trump’s hands. A whole new range of decisions is being made about the U.S. economy but without any congressional oversight or public knowledge. Which corporations get major infusions of taxpayer dollars in return for partial government ownership? Which get tariff exemptions and under what conditions? Which get exemptions to trade with China and under what conditions?

 

It’s all up to Trump and his lapdogs in the White House and at the Commerce Department. And it helps explain why corporate America will do whatever Trump asks, say whatever he wants, and obey whatever he demands. 

The result is not unlike the world’s last big experiment with national socialism — in the 1930s, in Germany. 

We Cannot Compromise With Neofascist Authoritarianism

The following post is by Robert Reich:

I keep hearing that one of America’s biggest problems is we’re “divided and polarized.” For example, New York Times columnist David French: “We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse.”

This is bullsh*t. The problem is not that we’re divided and polarized. 

The problem is that a significant portion of America is buying Trump’s violent, hateful, lawless crap. Some of those buying it are white supremacists. Others are conservative fundamentalist Christians. Others are xenophobic nationalists.

 

I feel compassion for those who’ve been seduced into supporting Trump after being brutalized and mistreated for years by employers, big corporations, Wall Street, and America’s oligarchs. As I warned 32 years ago, widening inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity would eventually persuade some on the losing side to support a demagogue.

But an explanation for why some of Trump’s followers have bought into his neofascism isn’t a justification for them to do so. And it’s certainly no reason for us to put aside our differences and compromise with them.

 

As you undoubtedly know, Trump has created a violent police state inside America. He is conducting an illegal war abroad. He has usurped the powers of Congress and defied court orders. He is taking bribes. He’s criminally prosecuting his enemies and pardoning his criminal supporters (he has even set up a slush fund to compensate them). He has gotten his Justice Department to immunize him and his family from any future tax audits. He is silencing critics. He is fomenting racism and bigotry.

 

None of us should fall for the false equivalency between this, and opposition to it. The contest today is not between “right” and “left,” as the two sides have traditionally been understood in America. It’s not even between “Republicans” and “Democrats,” as we’ve defined the two major parties over most of the past century.

 

No, the contest today is between democracy and authoritarianism. It’s between tolerance and bigotry. Between a multiracial, secular, inclusive society and one that believes in white Christian nationalism. Between the rule of law and neofascism. 

The two sides in this contest do not merit equal weight. If we are going to have a decent society, the nation must come down on the former side. 

As long as Trump has followers who support his bigotry, racism, corruption, and violence, the nation will remain divided and polarized. That is necessary and proper. 

We shouldn’t “reach out, or “meet halfway,” or “find middle ground,” or “split the difference,” or any other of today’s hackneyed expressions for putting aside what divides us and agreeing. 

Generations of Americans fought and died for the ideals of democracy, freedom, social justice, the rule of law, and equal opportunity. We have never fully achieved them, but they remain our ideals. Tomorrow we celebrate Memorial Day to honor those ideals and the memories of those who died for them. 

There cannot be, must not be, any compromise with neofascism.

Today's Republican Party Is Not Conservative - It's Become Fully Fascistic

 

The following post is part of an article by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

 

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers. 

— Unions hurt and rip off their members. 

— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs. 

— Social Security is going broke.

— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.” 

— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.

— America can’t afford a national healthcare system. 

— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.

— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.” 

— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.

— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.

— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.

— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage. 

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.

This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.