'A meddling socialist': NYT editorial board blasts Trump’s profiting off the economy

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U.S. President Donald Trump attends the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, U.S., May 24, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

President Donald Trump’s intervention in semiconductor giant Intel will do nothing but pad the president’s pockets, according to a blistering New York Times editorial.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Trump’s approach will probably do nothing to help the company. It is one more way in which he is intervening in the American economy on a whim, as if it were an extension of his family business, to the detriment of us all,” The Times said.

In August, the president announced that U.S. is now a multibillion-dollar shareholder in Intel as part of an agreement with CEO Lip-Bu Tan — much to the dismay of MAGA, who decried the move as "socialism."

"If a Democratic president pursued even one of these policies, Republicans would call him a meddling socialist," the Times argued.

"This is not how economic policy is supposed to work in a wealthy, democratic country," the Times wrote. "When the president takes the extreme step of intervening in particular companies, he should articulate a strategy, as [former President Barack] Obama did with the auto industry — and as the domestic semiconductor industry today needs. He should follow and respect the law."

"Instead, Mr. Trump’s approach to Intel reads like something out of Venezuela or Russia, where political leaders use threats and insults to cow business executives into submission," the editorial board added.

The newspaper also laid into Trump's allowing tech giants Nvidia and AMD to sell chips to China in exchange for a cut of the profits.

"Mr. Trump has repeatedly blasted through American norms and laws in pursuit of his economic policies," the Times wrote, excoriating his use of tariffs to "effectively [raise] taxes on Americans, without congressional approval, in a move that courts have since deemed illegal."

The Times continued calling out a laundry list of Trump's egregiousness, including his use of "the threat of those tariffs to compel companies, like Apple, and foreign governments to promise more investment in the United States."

"He has broken a century of precedent by trying to fire a governor of the Federal Reserve, the country’s independent central bank, based on unproven charges," the Times warned.

The editorial board also argued Trump's tactics have brought the country closer to autocracy.

"What differentiates a democracy from an autocracy is the process that leads to an outcome," the Times wrote. "A fair, legal process both protects citizens’ rights and tends to be better for the economy in the long run. The dollar, for example, has become the world’s reserve currency because of America’s stability: Investors can trust the United States to follow the law, respect previous agreements and pay its debts."

As countries like India and Spain move closer to China, Trump, says the Times, "has undermined that faith."

President Joe Biden, on the other hand, received some praise in the editorial, noting, "the Biden administration, working with congressional Republicans, took some valuable steps. A bipartisan 2022 law that subsidized domestic chip production has led to increased investment."

Trump's intervention in Intel, however, "does not help. ... The stake that he took in Intel does not even give it additional money. He instead intimidated the company into giving the federal government partial ownership in exchange for the subsidies it already received from the 2022 law."

"Mr. Trump evidently believes that his haphazard, self-centered approach to policy makes him look tough and decisive," the Times claimed. "In reality, it introduces more chaos to our economy, including to an industry at the center of 21st-century life."

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