THE NEW YORK TIMES: Stakes in private companies. Handshake deals with chief executives. The president’s economic policy has drifted far from principles that long defined the Republican Party. Is it capitalism at all?
Fresh off clinching the Republican nomination for president in May 2012, Mitt Romney paid a surprise visit to the shuttered California headquarters of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer whose bankruptcy a year earlier had left taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of federally guaranteed loans.
In Mr. Romney’s telling, the company’s failure was a textbook example of the perils of government meddling in the private sector. The free market is meant to reward companies for having the best ideas, the best technology, the best people, Mr. Romney said. Under President Barack Obama, however, companies were too often rewarded for knowing the right people.
“Free enterprise, to the president, means taking money from the taxpayer and giving it freely to his friends,” Mr. Romney said, before adding, “That is not the nature of how America works.”
Many economists at the time said Mr. Romney’s attack was unfair or exaggerated. Today, they use a different word to describe it: quaint.
Since returning to the White House last year, President Trump has gotten the government involved in the private sector in ways that Mr. Obama and other past presidents, of either major party, would never have considered.
The Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in corporations, intervened in business deals and negotiated a cut of the revenue of American companies’ overseas sales. Mr. Trump has unilaterally deployed tariffs and other policy levers to help industries he favors, like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and to punish those he dislikes, like wind power. He has wielded the powers of the federal bureaucracy to pressure executives, sometimes in ways that blur the lines between his policy objectives and his personal business interests. » | Ben Casselman | Sunday, February 22, 2026
