Dem
47
GOP
53
The essential characteristic of capitalism is a free market run by private companies pursuing profit as best they can without any government involvement. Communism (or, at least, socialism) is where the government owns (or at least manages) the means of production. Donald Trump has repeatedly shown that his heart is with communism. He has forced selected companies to sell some of their stock to the government, allowing it to own (part of) the means of production, the very definition of communism. The companies include Intel, L3Harris, Lithium Americas, MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, U.S. Steel, USA Rare Earth, Westinghouse, Vulcan Elements, and XLight. He has also ordered Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Bristol Mayers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Google, Hyundai, IBM, John Deere, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Meta, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi, Stellantis, TSMC, and NVIDIA to make investments of at least $10 billion in order to curry his favor. President Xi Jinping of China must be proud of his student—except for the part about Trump forgetting about the deal after the photo-op and not caring that the investment is never actually made. If a Democratic president had intervened so deeply in the affairs of private companies, Republicans would have gone ballistic, screaming "Communism! Communism! Communism!" from the rooftops, and it would have been true. Now, only praise for Trump's great deals.
The latest of Comrade Trump's deals involves TikTok. Congress passed a law ordering TikTok to divest itself of its U.S.
operations or be banned from operating in the U.S. The law was passed to avoid having a Chinese company own massive data
about Americans. Trump didn't see it that way at all. He didn't care about the Chinese having data about over 100
million Americans. He cared only about who got the profits from TikTok. Consequently, he brokered a deal between ByteDance
(the company that owns TikTok) and a group of his cronies, including Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, to buy the
right to the profits from the U.S. part of TikTok. Part of the deal was for TikTok to pay a
bribe
fee of $10 billion to the U.S. treasury for the privilege of allowing the deal to go forward. Since the U.S. part of
TikTok is valued at only $14 billion, that is a pretty hefty fee. Aaron Bartnick, a former assistant director for
technology security under Joe Biden, said $10 billion was "outrageously large." (V)