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| Meta Title | Trump’s Business Deals and Loyalty Scorecards - The Fulcrum | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Meta Description | Trump’s economic agenda reshapes GOP orthodoxy — from semiconductor shakedowns to AI investments — blurring lines between policy, power, and profit. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Boilerpipe Text | For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.
And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.
Most recently, President Trump forced Intel, the struggling semiconductor company, to give the U.S. government a nearly 10 percent stake in the company in return for nearly $9 billion in government funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS Act. Trump had previously criticized that law, which was part of an industrial policy intended to boost semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Trump had called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, based on vague allegations that Tan had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore).
A week before, the Trump administration had
cut another revenue-sharing agreement
with the world’s largest semiconductor company, Nvidia, whose chips are critical to the artificial intelligence boom. Oddly, last April, the president had barred Nvidia from exporting its highest-grade H20 chips to China. But after Nvidia agreed to cough up 15 percent of its revenues to the government, Trump relaxed those export rules even though doing so appears to violate the constitutional ban on taxing exports. These were shakedown operations, pure and simple, and President Trump seems to be pretty good at them.
In fact, a month before, in mid-June, the president shook down U.S. Steel and didn’t allow Japanese company Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of it to go through. For over a year, during his presidential campaign, Trump had spoken forcefully against this merger. Suddenly, he reversed and approved the merger, once Nippon agreed to allow the Trump administration to receive a
“golden share
” of the company. More than a regular share, it gives the president of the United States permanent and extraordinary influence over the company, including significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions. Activities requiring the president’s approval include closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and transferring production or jobs outside the U.S. The United Steelworkers union, which saw many of its
rank-and-file members support
Donald Trump for president in 2024, is feeling betrayed.
Last week, Trump
boasted on social media
that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” In a
recent CNBC interview
, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, economist Kevin Hassett, said that the administration is looking to gain stock equity in other companies, including military-related companies. So the White House is clearly not done, as it has announced the creation of a loyalty scorecard that
rates 553 companies
and trade associations on how well they have supported President Trump's efforts. So what Trump is doing with these companies could soon become a template for dozens of U.S. companies in which the White House demands its golden share.
Firing of many economic leaders — illegally
President Trump has pressed both of his thumbs on the scales of the economy in other ways. For example, he has attempted to fire any economic leaders who don’t agree with him, even those who are constitutionally protected from presidential meddling.
Most recently, he has attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees important functions such as establishing interest rates, money supply, inflation, and key components of national financial policy. If successful, this act could seriously undermine the trust and confidence of investors and policymakers around the world, since it would demonstrate that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent of the president’s whims and desires, as it was established to be in 1913.
Just recently, a federal appeals court
reinstated a commissioner
of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had illegally fired, the court ruling that a commissioner can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." But Trump fired her without giving any reason at all.
He did the same thing previously when he fired a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board, who was then
reinstated by a federal district court
. Then the U.S.
Supreme Court
temporarily stayed the reinstatement
while the top court decides the case sometime in the future. Even when courts reverse the president’s clearly illegal decisions, the situation is still intimidating for the harassed commissioners.
So President Trump – the government’s chief executive – is regularly inserting himself into the very heart of the U.S. economy in state-sponsored ways that are alien to traditional Republican values and principles. This signals a huge philosophical shift, not only by Trump but by the Republican Party. Instead of being the “conservative” party, now the White House has fully embraced a kind of “neo-socialist” radicalism combined with an adoption of Silicon Valley’s militant mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” (perhaps influenced initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s
DOGE
, before Trump and Musk’s high-profile falling out).
What if Democrats did the same?
The thing that is doubly ironic is that if a Democratic president did this – engaged in a shakedown of top companies for a government stake in their company, illegally fired top commissioners overseeing the economy, and more – GOP lawmakers and politicians would have been mounting a furious criticism over “government interference.” If a Democratic president had run up the debt to $37 trillion, started a trade war with unpredictable tariffs, fired experts and commissioners who disagreed over his policies, Republicans would have attacked Democrats as “closet socialists.” The GOP House majority may well have drawn up articles of impeachment against a Democratic president.
So President Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy, since President Ronald Reagan said “government
is
the problem,” and GOP leaders insisted on government playing as small a role as possible in the economy. Now, Trump is partially nationalizing the economy.
Investor-in-chief
President Trump, along with family members, is engaging in other unprecedented practices that impact the economy and raise important issues about conflicts of interest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive of artificial intelligence technologies as well as cryptocurrencies. As recently as 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a “
scam
.” But suddenly, Trump says he wants to make the United States the "
crypto capital of the world
."
Why the sudden volte-face? Simple. The Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have
launched a family investment strategy
beyond their traditional real estate and hotels portfolio, figuring out how to make a lot of money – billions of dollars – in
AI
and crypto investments.
A few weeks after the White House loosened the Biden administration’s AI regulations, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested a lot of money in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., which aims to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit richly from government backing for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reports that the Trump family's net worth has
increased by $2.9 billion
thanks to its various tech-related investments, which now reportedly represent
nearly 40% of Donald Trump’s personal net worth
. Trump, the Hotel King, is now the Crypto King.
When you combine the Trump family’s self-interest with global tariffs and all the other factors outlined above, it adds to the overall picture that the Trump family is trying to exert a heavy-handed and self-interested role in fundamentally remaking the U.S. economy. President Trump is steeped in overlapping public and private roles like no previous president, with the potential for ethics breaches and even
corruption
at every turn.
Steven Hill
was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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# Investor-in-Chief: Trump’s Business Deals, Loyalty Scorecards, and the Rise of Neo-Socialist Capitalism
## *The White House is using government control over the economy in ways that overturn traditional Republican values*Opinion

U.S. President Donald Trump discusses economic data with Stephen Moore (L), Senior Visiting Fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation, in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Getty Images, Win McNamee
[](https://thefulcrum.us/u/stevenhill)
By [Steven Hill](https://thefulcrum.us/u/stevenhill)Sep 11, 2025
Steven Hill
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. See more of his writing at his Substack newsletter [DemocracySOS](https://democracysos.substack.com/).
[See More Writings by author](https://thefulcrum.us/u/stevenhill)
For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.
And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.
***
Most recently, President Trump forced Intel, the struggling semiconductor company, to give the U.S. government a nearly 10 percent stake in the company in return for nearly \$9 billion in government funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS Act. Trump had previously criticized that law, which was part of an industrial policy intended to boost semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Trump had called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, based on vague allegations that Tan had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore).
A week before, the Trump administration had [cut another revenue-sharing agreement](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/458088/nvidia-trump-h20-chip-ai-china) with the world’s largest semiconductor company, Nvidia, whose chips are critical to the artificial intelligence boom. Oddly, last April, the president had barred Nvidia from exporting its highest-grade H20 chips to China. But after Nvidia agreed to cough up 15 percent of its revenues to the government, Trump relaxed those export rules even though doing so appears to violate the constitutional ban on taxing exports. These were shakedown operations, pure and simple, and President Trump seems to be pretty good at them.
In fact, a month before, in mid-June, the president shook down U.S. Steel and didn’t allow Japanese company Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of it to go through. For over a year, during his presidential campaign, Trump had spoken forcefully against this merger. Suddenly, he reversed and approved the merger, once Nippon agreed to allow the Trump administration to receive a [“golden share](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/politics/golden-share-us-steel-nippon-trump.html)” of the company. More than a regular share, it gives the president of the United States permanent and extraordinary influence over the company, including significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions. Activities requiring the president’s approval include closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and transferring production or jobs outside the U.S. The United Steelworkers union, which saw many of its [rank-and-file members support](https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/trump-secures-major-endorsement-pennsylvania-steelworkers-saved-jobs) Donald Trump for president in 2024, is feeling betrayed.
Last week, Trump [boasted on social media](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115089582863713336) that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” In a [recent CNBC interview](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/white-houses-hassett-says-government-likely-to-continue-taking-stakes-in-companies-similar-to-intel-deal.html), Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, economist Kevin Hassett, said that the administration is looking to gain stock equity in other companies, including military-related companies. So the White House is clearly not done, as it has announced the creation of a loyalty scorecard that [rates 553 companies](https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/white-house-rating-big-beautiful-bill) and trade associations on how well they have supported President Trump's efforts. So what Trump is doing with these companies could soon become a template for dozens of U.S. companies in which the White House demands its golden share.
### Firing of many economic leaders — illegally
President Trump has pressed both of his thumbs on the scales of the economy in other ways. For example, he has attempted to fire any economic leaders who don’t agree with him, even those who are constitutionally protected from presidential meddling.
Most recently, he has attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees important functions such as establishing interest rates, money supply, inflation, and key components of national financial policy. If successful, this act could seriously undermine the trust and confidence of investors and policymakers around the world, since it would demonstrate that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent of the president’s whims and desires, as it was established to be in 1913.
Just recently, a federal appeals court [reinstated a commissioner](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/02/trump-firing-ftc-member-dc-circuit-ruling-00540637) of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had illegally fired, the court ruling that a commissioner can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." But Trump fired her without giving any reason at all.
He did the same thing previously when he fired a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board, who was then reinstated by a federal district court. Then the U.S. [Supreme Court](https://thefulcrum.us/truly-supreme-court) [temporarily stayed the reinstatement](https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/04/u-s-supreme-court-temporarily-stays-nlrb-board-member-reinstatement-board-to-again-without-a-quorum/) while the top court decides the case sometime in the future. Even when courts reverse the president’s clearly illegal decisions, the situation is still intimidating for the harassed commissioners.
So President Trump – the government’s chief executive – is regularly inserting himself into the very heart of the U.S. economy in state-sponsored ways that are alien to traditional Republican values and principles. This signals a huge philosophical shift, not only by Trump but by the Republican Party. Instead of being the “conservative” party, now the White House has fully embraced a kind of “neo-socialist” radicalism combined with an adoption of Silicon Valley’s militant mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” (perhaps influenced initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s [DOGE](https://thefulcrum.us/tag/doge), before Trump and Musk’s high-profile falling out).
### What if Democrats did the same?
The thing that is doubly ironic is that if a Democratic president did this – engaged in a shakedown of top companies for a government stake in their company, illegally fired top commissioners overseeing the economy, and more – GOP lawmakers and politicians would have been mounting a furious criticism over “government interference.” If a Democratic president had run up the debt to \$37 trillion, started a trade war with unpredictable tariffs, fired experts and commissioners who disagreed over his policies, Republicans would have attacked Democrats as “closet socialists.” The GOP House majority may well have drawn up articles of impeachment against a Democratic president.
So President Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy, since President Ronald Reagan said “government *is* the problem,” and GOP leaders insisted on government playing as small a role as possible in the economy. Now, Trump is partially nationalizing the economy.
### Investor-in-chief
President Trump, along with family members, is engaging in other unprecedented practices that impact the economy and raise important issues about conflicts of interest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive of artificial intelligence technologies as well as cryptocurrencies. As recently as 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a “[scam](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734).” But suddenly, Trump says he wants to make the United States the "[crypto capital of the world](https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-vows-make-us-undisputed-bitcoin-superpower-crypto-capital-world)."
Why the sudden volte-face? Simple. The Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have [launched a family investment strategy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/02/20/trump-eric-don-jr-ai-american-data-centers-dominari-artifical-intelligence-ethics/) beyond their traditional real estate and hotels portfolio, figuring out how to make a lot of money – billions of dollars – in [AI](https://thefulcrum.us/the-new-world-of-ai) and crypto investments.
A few weeks after the White House loosened the Biden administration’s AI regulations, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested a lot of money in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., which aims to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit richly from government backing for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reports that the Trump family's net worth has [increased by \$2.9 billion](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-family-net-worth-crypto-investments/) thanks to its various tech-related investments, which now reportedly represent [nearly 40% of Donald Trump’s personal net worth](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cryptocurrency-campaign-nashville/). Trump, the Hotel King, is now the Crypto King.
When you combine the Trump family’s self-interest with global tariffs and all the other factors outlined above, it adds to the overall picture that the Trump family is trying to exert a heavy-handed and self-interested role in fundamentally remaking the U.S. economy. President Trump is steeped in overlapping public and private roles like no previous president, with the potential for ethics breaches and even [corruption](https://thefulcrum.us/corruption/george-santos-lies) at every turn.
**Steven Hill** was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
## Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
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## Latest news
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### [Trump Even Wants the Postal Service to Help Erode Democracy](https://thefulcrum.us/elections/trump-even-wants-the-postal-service-to-help-erode-democracy)
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[](https://thefulcrum.us/rule-of-law/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-challenge)
### [Blood or Soil? Why America is Turning Toward the 'Old World' Model](https://thefulcrum.us/rule-of-law/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-challenge)
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[](https://thefulcrum.us/rule-of-law/dhs-and-ice-abuse-allegations)
### [Should I Stay or Should I Go? When To Cut and Run On America](https://thefulcrum.us/rule-of-law/dhs-and-ice-abuse-allegations)
Apr 13, 2026
[](https://thefulcrum.us/economy/kevin-warsh-fed-reserve)
### [Trump Fed Pick Kevin Warsh Could Shake Up the Central Bank With His ‘Family Fight’ Model](https://thefulcrum.us/economy/kevin-warsh-fed-reserve)
Apr 07, 2026
[](https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/democracy-evolving-not-eroding-shaping-its-future)
### [Democracy Isn’t Eroding. It’s Evolving. The Question Is: Toward What?](https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/democracy-evolving-not-eroding-shaping-its-future)
Apr 14, 2026
## Discover More
For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.
And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.
***
Most recently, President Trump forced Intel, the struggling semiconductor company, to give the U.S. government a nearly 10 percent stake in the company in return for nearly \$9 billion in government funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS Act. Trump had previously criticized that law, which was part of an industrial policy intended to boost semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Trump had called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, based on vague allegations that Tan had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore).
A week before, the Trump administration had [cut another revenue-sharing agreement](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/458088/nvidia-trump-h20-chip-ai-china) with the world’s largest semiconductor company, Nvidia, whose chips are critical to the artificial intelligence boom. Oddly, last April, the president had barred Nvidia from exporting its highest-grade H20 chips to China. But after Nvidia agreed to cough up 15 percent of its revenues to the government, Trump relaxed those export rules even though doing so appears to violate the constitutional ban on taxing exports. These were shakedown operations, pure and simple, and President Trump seems to be pretty good at them.
In fact, a month before, in mid-June, the president shook down U.S. Steel and didn’t allow Japanese company Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of it to go through. For over a year, during his presidential campaign, Trump had spoken forcefully against this merger. Suddenly, he reversed and approved the merger, once Nippon agreed to allow the Trump administration to receive a [“golden share](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/politics/golden-share-us-steel-nippon-trump.html)” of the company. More than a regular share, it gives the president of the United States permanent and extraordinary influence over the company, including significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions. Activities requiring the president’s approval include closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and transferring production or jobs outside the U.S. The United Steelworkers union, which saw many of its [rank-and-file members support](https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/trump-secures-major-endorsement-pennsylvania-steelworkers-saved-jobs) Donald Trump for president in 2024, is feeling betrayed.
Last week, Trump [boasted on social media](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115089582863713336) that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” In a [recent CNBC interview](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/white-houses-hassett-says-government-likely-to-continue-taking-stakes-in-companies-similar-to-intel-deal.html), Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, economist Kevin Hassett, said that the administration is looking to gain stock equity in other companies, including military-related companies. So the White House is clearly not done, as it has announced the creation of a loyalty scorecard that [rates 553 companies](https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/white-house-rating-big-beautiful-bill) and trade associations on how well they have supported President Trump's efforts. So what Trump is doing with these companies could soon become a template for dozens of U.S. companies in which the White House demands its golden share.
### Firing of many economic leaders — illegally
President Trump has pressed both of his thumbs on the scales of the economy in other ways. For example, he has attempted to fire any economic leaders who don’t agree with him, even those who are constitutionally protected from presidential meddling.
Most recently, he has attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees important functions such as establishing interest rates, money supply, inflation, and key components of national financial policy. If successful, this act could seriously undermine the trust and confidence of investors and policymakers around the world, since it would demonstrate that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent of the president’s whims and desires, as it was established to be in 1913.
Just recently, a federal appeals court [reinstated a commissioner](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/02/trump-firing-ftc-member-dc-circuit-ruling-00540637) of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had illegally fired, the court ruling that a commissioner can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." But Trump fired her without giving any reason at all.
He did the same thing previously when he fired a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board, who was then reinstated by a federal district court. Then the U.S. [Supreme Court](https://thefulcrum.us/truly-supreme-court) [temporarily stayed the reinstatement](https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/04/u-s-supreme-court-temporarily-stays-nlrb-board-member-reinstatement-board-to-again-without-a-quorum/) while the top court decides the case sometime in the future. Even when courts reverse the president’s clearly illegal decisions, the situation is still intimidating for the harassed commissioners.
So President Trump – the government’s chief executive – is regularly inserting himself into the very heart of the U.S. economy in state-sponsored ways that are alien to traditional Republican values and principles. This signals a huge philosophical shift, not only by Trump but by the Republican Party. Instead of being the “conservative” party, now the White House has fully embraced a kind of “neo-socialist” radicalism combined with an adoption of Silicon Valley’s militant mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” (perhaps influenced initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s [DOGE](https://thefulcrum.us/tag/doge), before Trump and Musk’s high-profile falling out).
### What if Democrats did the same?
The thing that is doubly ironic is that if a Democratic president did this – engaged in a shakedown of top companies for a government stake in their company, illegally fired top commissioners overseeing the economy, and more – GOP lawmakers and politicians would have been mounting a furious criticism over “government interference.” If a Democratic president had run up the debt to \$37 trillion, started a trade war with unpredictable tariffs, fired experts and commissioners who disagreed over his policies, Republicans would have attacked Democrats as “closet socialists.” The GOP House majority may well have drawn up articles of impeachment against a Democratic president.
So President Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy, since President Ronald Reagan said “government *is* the problem,” and GOP leaders insisted on government playing as small a role as possible in the economy. Now, Trump is partially nationalizing the economy.
### Investor-in-chief
President Trump, along with family members, is engaging in other unprecedented practices that impact the economy and raise important issues about conflicts of interest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive of artificial intelligence technologies as well as cryptocurrencies. As recently as 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a “[scam](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734).” But suddenly, Trump says he wants to make the United States the "[crypto capital of the world](https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-vows-make-us-undisputed-bitcoin-superpower-crypto-capital-world)."
Why the sudden volte-face? Simple. The Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have [launched a family investment strategy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/02/20/trump-eric-don-jr-ai-american-data-centers-dominari-artifical-intelligence-ethics/) beyond their traditional real estate and hotels portfolio, figuring out how to make a lot of money – billions of dollars – in [AI](https://thefulcrum.us/the-new-world-of-ai) and crypto investments.
A few weeks after the White House loosened the Biden administration’s AI regulations, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested a lot of money in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., which aims to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit richly from government backing for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reports that the Trump family's net worth has [increased by \$2.9 billion](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-family-net-worth-crypto-investments/) thanks to its various tech-related investments, which now reportedly represent [nearly 40% of Donald Trump’s personal net worth](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cryptocurrency-campaign-nashville/). Trump, the Hotel King, is now the Crypto King.
When you combine the Trump family’s self-interest with global tariffs and all the other factors outlined above, it adds to the overall picture that the Trump family is trying to exert a heavy-handed and self-interested role in fundamentally remaking the U.S. economy. President Trump is steeped in overlapping public and private roles like no previous president, with the potential for ethics breaches and even [corruption](https://thefulcrum.us/corruption/george-santos-lies) at every turn.
**Steven Hill** was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
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- [Dollar in Decline: Trump’s Economic Policies and a Falling Dollar ›](https://thefulcrum.us/money-politics/us-dollar-decline-trump-presidency)
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## Read More
[](https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/trump-market-disruption)
U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a television screen as traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on April 07, 2025 in New York City.
Getty Images, Spencer Platt
### [Trump 2.0 Policies Clash With Business School Fundamentals, Fortune 500 CEOs Warn](https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/trump-market-disruption)
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Leaders of universities have expressed shock when actions by Donald Trump and his 2.0 administration officials have gone directly counter to what he and his appointees supposedly learned during their business-related college education. But what do professors know?
I’ve been privileged to teach and serve as a Marketing department head at an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business-accredited institution; only 6% of business schools worldwide have achieved AACSB recognition. As such, one gets to know the multi-year process that third-party evaluators, including corporate executives, use to rigorously examine the curriculum offerings of accounting, economics, finance, marketing, and management—and, subsequently—what principles well-trained business students should exemplify.
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### [Virginia On The Path to Join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact](https://thefulcrum.us/electoral-reforms/virginia-national-popular-vote-compact)
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Getty Images, bymuratdeniz
### [Just the Facts: U.S.–Canada Tariff War Escalates As Trump Raises Stakes](https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/canada-u-s-trade-war-2025)
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[**The Fulcrum**](https://thefulcrum.us/electoral-reforms/america-is-not-polarized) **strives to approach news stories with an open mind and skepticism, striving to present our readers with a broad spectrum of viewpoints through diligent research and critical thinking. As best we can, remove personal bias from our reporting and seek a variety of perspectives in both our news gathering and selection of opinion pieces. However, before our readers can analyze varying viewpoints, they must have the facts.**
Since President Trump took office in January 2025, the US has imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian imports, prompting Canada to retaliate with its own measures. As of October 2025, Canadian goods face up to 35% tariffs, while Canada has matched many of these with its own levies.
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Close up of american visa label in passport.
Getty Images/Alexander W. Helin
### [Is America Still Welcoming Global Talent?](https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/us-visa-policy-changes-2025)
[Wei Zhang](https://thefulcrum.us/u/weizhang)
Oct 22, 2025
A few weeks ago, when new proposals limiting J and F visa expansion were open for public comment, immigration quickly became a hot topic again at our research center, where more than half the scientists come from abroad. Some worried about their plan, others traded news and updates about the H1-B. A colleague asked if I was anxious too. To my own surprise, I wasn’t.
I used to be. But after weathering turbulent visa policies under different U.S. administrations, like many other international scholars, I have learned to stay flexible and mobile. My U.S. visa for a graduate program was delayed due to tensions between the U.S. and China several years ago. Up against a deadline for the program, I pivoted to Japan to continue the research training. What felt like a closed door became a new window: I fortunately joined a world-class team in tissue-engineering vascular medicine, broadened my view of clinical care and research, and began bridging my path as both practitioner and scientist. Committed to strengthening the “bench-to-bed” pipeline—learning real-world needs and translating research to meet them—I chose the United States again to carry this work forward.
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### [Rail Merger Holds Promise for the Economy](https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/union-pacific-and-norfolk-southern)
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Oct 09, 2025
Boosting domestic industry and manufacturing continues to be a key economic theme. A recently proposed merger between two major railroad companies could advance those goals—and it carries particular promise for underserved communities who are often on the front lines of America’s workforce.
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| Readable Markdown | For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.
And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.
***
Most recently, President Trump forced Intel, the struggling semiconductor company, to give the U.S. government a nearly 10 percent stake in the company in return for nearly \$9 billion in government funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS Act. Trump had previously criticized that law, which was part of an industrial policy intended to boost semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Trump had called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, based on vague allegations that Tan had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore).
A week before, the Trump administration had [cut another revenue-sharing agreement](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/458088/nvidia-trump-h20-chip-ai-china) with the world’s largest semiconductor company, Nvidia, whose chips are critical to the artificial intelligence boom. Oddly, last April, the president had barred Nvidia from exporting its highest-grade H20 chips to China. But after Nvidia agreed to cough up 15 percent of its revenues to the government, Trump relaxed those export rules even though doing so appears to violate the constitutional ban on taxing exports. These were shakedown operations, pure and simple, and President Trump seems to be pretty good at them.
In fact, a month before, in mid-June, the president shook down U.S. Steel and didn’t allow Japanese company Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of it to go through. For over a year, during his presidential campaign, Trump had spoken forcefully against this merger. Suddenly, he reversed and approved the merger, once Nippon agreed to allow the Trump administration to receive a [“golden share](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/politics/golden-share-us-steel-nippon-trump.html)” of the company. More than a regular share, it gives the president of the United States permanent and extraordinary influence over the company, including significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions. Activities requiring the president’s approval include closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and transferring production or jobs outside the U.S. The United Steelworkers union, which saw many of its [rank-and-file members support](https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/trump-secures-major-endorsement-pennsylvania-steelworkers-saved-jobs) Donald Trump for president in 2024, is feeling betrayed.
Last week, Trump [boasted on social media](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115089582863713336) that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” In a [recent CNBC interview](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/white-houses-hassett-says-government-likely-to-continue-taking-stakes-in-companies-similar-to-intel-deal.html), Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, economist Kevin Hassett, said that the administration is looking to gain stock equity in other companies, including military-related companies. So the White House is clearly not done, as it has announced the creation of a loyalty scorecard that [rates 553 companies](https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/white-house-rating-big-beautiful-bill) and trade associations on how well they have supported President Trump's efforts. So what Trump is doing with these companies could soon become a template for dozens of U.S. companies in which the White House demands its golden share.
### Firing of many economic leaders — illegally
President Trump has pressed both of his thumbs on the scales of the economy in other ways. For example, he has attempted to fire any economic leaders who don’t agree with him, even those who are constitutionally protected from presidential meddling.
Most recently, he has attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees important functions such as establishing interest rates, money supply, inflation, and key components of national financial policy. If successful, this act could seriously undermine the trust and confidence of investors and policymakers around the world, since it would demonstrate that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent of the president’s whims and desires, as it was established to be in 1913.
Just recently, a federal appeals court [reinstated a commissioner](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/02/trump-firing-ftc-member-dc-circuit-ruling-00540637) of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had illegally fired, the court ruling that a commissioner can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." But Trump fired her without giving any reason at all.
He did the same thing previously when he fired a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board, who was then reinstated by a federal district court. Then the U.S. [Supreme Court](https://thefulcrum.us/truly-supreme-court) [temporarily stayed the reinstatement](https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/04/u-s-supreme-court-temporarily-stays-nlrb-board-member-reinstatement-board-to-again-without-a-quorum/) while the top court decides the case sometime in the future. Even when courts reverse the president’s clearly illegal decisions, the situation is still intimidating for the harassed commissioners.
So President Trump – the government’s chief executive – is regularly inserting himself into the very heart of the U.S. economy in state-sponsored ways that are alien to traditional Republican values and principles. This signals a huge philosophical shift, not only by Trump but by the Republican Party. Instead of being the “conservative” party, now the White House has fully embraced a kind of “neo-socialist” radicalism combined with an adoption of Silicon Valley’s militant mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” (perhaps influenced initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s [DOGE](https://thefulcrum.us/tag/doge), before Trump and Musk’s high-profile falling out).
### What if Democrats did the same?
The thing that is doubly ironic is that if a Democratic president did this – engaged in a shakedown of top companies for a government stake in their company, illegally fired top commissioners overseeing the economy, and more – GOP lawmakers and politicians would have been mounting a furious criticism over “government interference.” If a Democratic president had run up the debt to \$37 trillion, started a trade war with unpredictable tariffs, fired experts and commissioners who disagreed over his policies, Republicans would have attacked Democrats as “closet socialists.” The GOP House majority may well have drawn up articles of impeachment against a Democratic president.
So President Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy, since President Ronald Reagan said “government *is* the problem,” and GOP leaders insisted on government playing as small a role as possible in the economy. Now, Trump is partially nationalizing the economy.
### Investor-in-chief
President Trump, along with family members, is engaging in other unprecedented practices that impact the economy and raise important issues about conflicts of interest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive of artificial intelligence technologies as well as cryptocurrencies. As recently as 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a “[scam](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734).” But suddenly, Trump says he wants to make the United States the "[crypto capital of the world](https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-vows-make-us-undisputed-bitcoin-superpower-crypto-capital-world)."
Why the sudden volte-face? Simple. The Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have [launched a family investment strategy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/02/20/trump-eric-don-jr-ai-american-data-centers-dominari-artifical-intelligence-ethics/) beyond their traditional real estate and hotels portfolio, figuring out how to make a lot of money – billions of dollars – in [AI](https://thefulcrum.us/the-new-world-of-ai) and crypto investments.
A few weeks after the White House loosened the Biden administration’s AI regulations, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested a lot of money in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., which aims to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit richly from government backing for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reports that the Trump family's net worth has [increased by \$2.9 billion](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-family-net-worth-crypto-investments/) thanks to its various tech-related investments, which now reportedly represent [nearly 40% of Donald Trump’s personal net worth](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cryptocurrency-campaign-nashville/). Trump, the Hotel King, is now the Crypto King.
When you combine the Trump family’s self-interest with global tariffs and all the other factors outlined above, it adds to the overall picture that the Trump family is trying to exert a heavy-handed and self-interested role in fundamentally remaking the U.S. economy. President Trump is steeped in overlapping public and private roles like no previous president, with the potential for ethics breaches and even [corruption](https://thefulcrum.us/corruption/george-santos-lies) at every turn.
**Steven Hill** was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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