If you want to understand the silly little scene that played out between Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday, you might start by remembering something that Vice President J.D. Vance said two years ago.
While attending a conference for nationalist conservatives, Vance offered an astonishing view of politics. The "idea that there is this extremely strong division between the public sector and the private sector" was flawed, Vance argued. In reality, he went on to say, "there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together."
That's a useful framework for understanding much of what has happened since Trump (with Vance at his side) returned to the White House in January. That includes various trade policies and tariffs, of course, but also the "golden share" in U.S. Steel that Trump secured for himself, and how the administration leveraged its regulatory authority to force Paramount to pay a huge settlement. In each case, the Trump administration has tried to erase (or has ignored) the distinction between the public and the private sectors, just as Vance said.
