Trump Is Treating the Economy Like His Family Business

Opinion|Trump Is Treating the Economy Like His Family Business

More than 15 years ago, President Barack Obama decided that America’s automakers were too important to die, and he used government money to save them. There is a plausible argument that Intel, the semiconductor company, falls into the same category. It is one of the few makers of computer chips in the United States. Other companies, like Nvidia, design chips but rely primarily on Taiwanese factories to make them, which presents serious economic and national security vulnerabilities in the event of a war there. Government help for Intel — and President Trump recently had the government take a stake in it — could help the company make a comeback, much as the Obama bailout did for the domestic auto industry.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump’s approach will probably do nothing to help the company. It is one more way in which he is intervening in the American economy on a whim, as if it were an extension of his family business, to the detriment of us all.

Mr. Trump began his interaction with Intel on social media. He berated Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, for his business ties to China from previous jobs and demanded that he resign. Mr. Tan went to the Oval Office to save his job. During the meeting, Mr. Trump suggested that Intel give a 10 percent stake to the United States government. Mr. Tan, under obvious duress, agreed.

This is not how economic policy is supposed to work in a wealthy, democratic country. When the president takes the extreme step of intervening in particular companies, he should articulate a strategy, as Mr. Obama did with the auto industry — and as the domestic semiconductor industry today needs. He should follow and respect the law. Instead, Mr. Trump’s approach to Intel reads like something out of Venezuela or Russia, where political leaders use threats and insults to cow business executives into submission.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly blasted through American norms and laws in pursuit of his economic policies. He allowed Nvidia and AMD to sell chips to China on the highly unusual condition that the companies give the government a cut of the revenue. He enacted tariffs on other countries, effectively raising taxes on Americans, without congressional approval, in a move that courts have since deemed illegal. He has used the threat of those tariffs to compel companies, like Apple, and foreign governments to promise more investment in the United States. He has broken a century of precedent by trying to fire a governor of the Federal Reserve, the country’s independent central bank, based on unproven charges.

If a Democratic president pursued even one of these policies, Republicans would call him a meddling socialist.