August 23, 2025.

It is my great honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of Intel,

a great American company that has an even more incredible future, President Donald Trump

wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7th

for its chief executive officer, Lipbu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11th, the president says, he told Tan the U.S.

should be given 10% of intel. Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as the highly

respected chief executive officer of the company. It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free

markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the

government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country,

and now how they have put power over everything.

It wasn't always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic

social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based

international order to try to prevent another world war.

Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him.

After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned. But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the

Movement Conservatives. Their roots lay in 1937 when men who hated the New Deal legislation

being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated

business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated black rights and with religious

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