President Donald Trump woke up Wednesday morning and decided the market needed a little management.
In just 24 hours, the president unveiled three massive state interventions into different markets that might’ve once looked—and sounded—like unacceptable levels of socialist dirigisme for a Republican to champion. The speed and breadth of the actions reflect a defining feature of Trump’s second term: a growing willingness to abandon the GOP’s traditional laissez-faire posture and exercise direct control over private economic activity.
“He’s taking an extreme left-wing position which looks like state capitalism,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a longtime corporate governance scholar and the founding dean of Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute. “It is MAGA going Maoist. So it is taking away the discretion of individual managers—the control of the ownership of the business by its stakeholders, by its owners, the decision-making. And it is disrupting the wisdom of markets.”
