.

President Donald Trump last week authorized the purchase of a 10% stake in the American chipmaker, a multibillion-dollar rescue of a once-iconic U.S. company that has rankled conservatives who normally support the president.

Trump has brushed off the criticism, likening the deal to buying stock, saying it will make the United States “richer and richer” and touting the stake as “a great investment for our country.”

But Trump has also made clear that the Intel rescue is just the first of many investments in American businesses the government will make as it seeks to grow the U.S. economy. “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it,” Trump said last week.

The moves have some critics and some allies wondering whether the Trump administration has taken a page out of a socialist playbook — or at least some long-discredited Republican doctrine known as industrial policy. That approach, once widely disdained by conservatives, saw the government assume a direct role in the nation’s key industries to direct economic growth and activity.

The idea of the federal government taking an ownership stake in private business sounds “eerily socialist,” Chris Barron, a former Republican National Committee chair, said in an email. Barron noted that decades of conservative rhetoric have defined socialism at least in part as the government’s control of the means of production in society.

If that is true, Trump has merely embraced socialism as practiced in many other countries, including Russia and China, several former Trump officials and Trump advisers said. If he takes equity stakes in more companies, they added, Trump would be acting very much like the Chinese Communist Party.

Trump has denied that he is embracing socialism. “This is not socialism at all,” he told the Washington Examiner last week. “We’ll be the richest country, by far.”

Several Trump allies, including former White House officials and advisers, told the Washington Examiner that the Intel investment was an entirely different thing — a vote of confidence in American capitalism. Trump has already said he will take a hands-off approach to the investment and that the federal government will remain a non-voting shareholder with no role in Intel’s corporate decisions. Trump did promise the federal government will receive some interest from the company and some financial upside should Intel stock rise in value in the coming years.

“A smart investor does that all the time, and that’s what he’s doing,” Judd Deere, a former White House spokesman, said in an email.

In fact, Trump converted $8.7 billion in direct grants — money already approved for Intel from the Biden administration’s bipartisan Chips Act — into equity for the U.S. government. By that accounting, Trump claims he has created $10 billion to $11 billion in value for the taxpayer, immediately.

Other conservatives have not been as charitable, particularly after the president had previously signaled during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would oppose such investments. Trump indicated at an Iowa rally in April that the government should not take equity stakes in private companies. (Trump’s 2024 GOP primary opponent and possible vice presidential running mate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., previously took an even stronger position in his own criticism of Trump, vowing that such a policy would never happen under his watch.)

Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser in the White House, said he was “very, very uncomfortable with that idea” in an interview on Fox Business, and Steve Moore, an informal adviser to Trump and close Fox Business contributor, called it “bad policy” and a “socialist step” in a separate interview on the network. “I hate corporate welfare. That’s privatization in reverse,” Moore said. “We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets. So terrible, one of the bad ideas that’s come out of this White House.”

National Review published an editorial late last week saying, “government shouldn’t get into the chip business,” and warning that Trump was threatening to “squander the long-recovering private Intel” and could create a “semi-state-owned enterprise a la CCCP, the former Soviet Union, where Intel’s funding comes from.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) expressed alarm with the move in an interview with the Washington Examiner, and fellow Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) doubled down on the critique in a pair of tweets after the decision. “Wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea,” Paul wrote.

On the other hand, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gleefully wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that Intel’s nationalization was “exactly the kind of action I’ve been fighting for!” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also rushed to Trump’s defense, telling Laura Ingraham: “I can tell you 100% that the president is 100% going to create jobs.”

Intel on Friday also filed a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission flagging a host of potential risks for the company from its new stakeholder. The arrangement “may result in us being a less attractive candidate for future government funding,” Intel warned, and it might damage its sales and relationships with customers worldwide and subject it to more oversight and regulation. Intel’s stock price was up 4% after Trump’s announcement on X, but the company’s market cap is about $110 billion, down 50% from the start of the year. Intel announced a 15% workforce reduction in February.