All empires tilt at windmills. Fleas are magnified into elephants. Existential threats are summoned into being. President Donald Trump’s jousting against “communism” before the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26, 2026 is exemplary.
Trump trumpeted, “We have to stop this, this horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”
“Communism?” It breathed its last gasp 35 years ago with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. China ended its flirtation with communism with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The latter was a victim of Mao’s mad Cultural Revolution. Dengist reform changed the motivating factor in Chinese policy from communist dogma to the idea that “to get rich is glorious.” His attitude on economics was encapsulated in the saying, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
The number of active communists in the United States approximates 11,000, an infinitesimal fraction of the population. A grand total of four members of the Communist Party of the United States of America hold electoral office in 2026, all minor local offices. Is there a single American who sleeps worried that Communists will soon be dominating the corridors of power?
But suppose Trump is invoking communism as a shorthand for government control of the economy and the handcuffing or eclipsing of private enterprise commonly associated with socialism. Trump himself, then, is often indistinguishable from a communist economic planner. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, popularized the phrase “commanding heights” of the economy in 1922 to defend his New Economic Policy. Lenin maintained that the state must retain control of strategically vital economic sectors—like heavy industry, banking, energy, and foreign trade—to underwrite wider prosperity and growth.
Is Trump any different?
He is actively exploring options to acquire equity stakes in major AI companies to redistribute income derived from economic growth and entrepreneurship to all Americans. He has voiced interest in a “partnership with the American public” regarding AI profits.
The Trump administration, guided by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has embarked on an aggressive industrial policy that includes strategic equity stakes in imagined vital sectors, including national security and critical supply chains.
Trump is targeting up to seven strategic sectors, including supposedly indispensable minerals (such as rare earths), semiconductors, steel, and aerospace. Trump’s administration has invested in upstream defense and tech suppliers like MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, and emerging quantum computing firms. Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act to force contractors to accelerate munitions production in response to depleted stockpiles. He has issued executive orders ostensibly to modernize defense acquisitions and limit stock buybacks or dividend payouts by contractors, aiming to ensure private capital is reinvested into manufacturing capacity.
He negotiated government management of U.S. Steel as a condition of the latter’s acquisition by Nippon Steel.
He had the U.S. government take a 10 percent equity stake in Intel at a cost of $8.9 billion.
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In violation of the constitutional prohibition on export taxes, Mr. Trump has demanded 25 percent of Nvidia’s revenues as a condition of exporting semiconductors to China.
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, gospel to the Founding Fathers, elaborated on the economic lunacy of government interventions in private enterprise typified by Lenin and Trump. Reflect on the timelessness of Smith’s perspicacity:
The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be entrusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatsoever, and which would nowhere be more dangerous in the hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
