From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Tuesday, August 26th.

So here's a headline you might not have expected to ever see.

It's from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday,

Trump wins Bernie Sanders endorsement. Wait, what? You're probably thinking, this is an April

Fool's Day. Trump wins Bernie Sanders endorsement? What? Well, yeah, that's real. And here's why.

As the op-ed notes, quoting Reuters, Sanders threw his support behind President

Donald Trump's plan to convert U.S. grants to chipmakers, including $10.9 billion for Intel,

into government stakes in the company. Sanders said, quote, if microchip companies make a profit

from the generous grants they receive from

the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that

investment. Then he added, taxpayers should not be providing billions of dollars in corporate welfare

to large profitable corporations like Intel without getting anything in return.

I spared you doing a Bernie Sanders imitation, but those were his words.

And the column by Wall Street Journal Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman notes that Sanders tried and failed to enable this kind of intervention in President

Biden's 2022 Chips and Science Act.

That's where these subsidies to Intel come from.

The James Freeman column, by the way, denounces the idea, in case you were wondering,

calls Sanders Marxist for liking it. I guess by extension,

he's suggesting that Trump is being a Marxist here too, right? And Freeman writes that turning

...