Is Trump a Socialist?

[Kamaji]

Is Trump a Socialist?

Donald Trump’s new stock-buying strategy isn’t socialism, but it is a step toward a government-controlled economy.

Andrew Heaton
11.7.2025

Recently, a handful of people—none of whom have ever invited me to their birthday party—accused President Donald Trump of being a socialist. Gavin Newsom, who many pundits credibly believe is the governor of California, said Trump is committing socialism by having the federal government buy stock in private companies.

At the time of writing, the government has taken shares in Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, U.S. Steel, and even a Canadian mining company that mines cobalt or some other stupid mineral I hate. This raises the question:

Is Trump, as Newsom contends, a full-blown socialist? Or is he just an asymptomatic carrier of socialism, like I am with tuberculosis?

Let's nail down what we're talking about.

In socialism, the government owns the means of production. Instead of private companies making goods to satisfy customers and turn a profit, the state produces things to hit output quotas. That's a lot easier to do if you cut quality. The Soviet Union literally made televisions so poorly that they sometimes exploded. Not a great incentive structure for generating stuff, even if an exploding television is still an improvement over The View.

A softer version exists in countries with national health care systems like the U.K., where doctors and nurses are government employees and hospitals are mostly run by the state. If you're talking about nationalizing an industry that provides goods or services—that's socialism.

By contrast, corporatism or state capitalism—or if you want to be edgy, fascism—is when private companies technically own the means of production, but the government controls the decisions. You own the shoe factory, but some bureaucrat in the capital issues diktats on what kind of shoes to make, how many, and so forth. You own the deed to the factory and you keep the profits from the factory, but the economy itself is managed from the top down by the central government.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2025/11/07/is-trump-a-socialist/

[The_Reader_David]

In answer to the question:  no. 

But I for one am annoyed that he has finally actually provided a legitimate basis for left-wing nitwits to call a Republican a "fascist".  Mussolini's definition of fascism was "the union of corporate and state power."  The Feds owning bits of corporations sounds fascist to me.

Of course, so does what the Democrats were doing for years before Elon Musk bought Twitter:  using tech companies as cut-outs to censor public discourse to suppress views opposed to government decreed acceptable views.

[Kamaji]

In answer to the question:  no. 

But I for one am annoyed that he has finally actually provided a legitimate basis for left-wing nitwits to call a Republican a "fascist".  Mussolini's definition of fascism was "the union of corporate and state power."  The Feds owning bits of corporations sounds fascist to me.

Of course, so does what the Democrats were doing for years before Elon Musk bought Twitter:  using tech companies as cut-outs to censor public discourse to suppress views opposed to government decreed acceptable views.

The author would generally agree; the punchline to the article:

So is Donald Trump a socialist? No. I don't think he is. His logic seems to be: "Instead of giving money to big companies for free, we should be getting the most out of the deal, so let's have some stock and dividends." But the effect of these acquisitions is that America is inching toward an economy in which the government doesn't play referee; it's a player on the field. And the government is a really, really stupid player.