The V-Dem project in Sweden, which tracks democratic erosion globally, has produced a striking data point: on its "state ownership of the economy" scale, the United States fell from second place to 16th during the first year of Trump's second term. From 2002 to 2024, the US had consistently ranked among the four countries with the least state control. That changed fast. The mechanism is direct. By November 2025, the Trump administration had spent more than $10bn acquiring stakes in companies deemed essential for national security — Intel, critical mineral ventures, an option on Westinghouse's nuclear reactor business. It blackmailed Nippon Steel into granting Washington a "golden share" in US Steel as a condition of its acquisition. These are not market transactions. They are state seizures dressed in deal language. The irony is structural, not merely rhetorical. Trump's TV ads promise to "defeat communism" — paid for with taxpayer dollars. His proposed $5,000 payment to every American if Republicans hold Congress treats the federal treasury as a personal slush fund. He has threatened to "STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT," a position that echoes the Marxist-inspired dependency theory that swept Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, not the free-market orthodoxy Republicans nominally champion. Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute offers important context: the US is still less state-controlled than 163 countries. Norway, ranked 18th, holds a majority stake in its oil giant. Private companies generate 60% of China's GDP. State equity positions in strategic industries are not inherently pathological — there's a reasonable case for them in a world where Chinese state subsidies distort competition. The problem is not the tool. It's the operator. What distinguishes Trump's statism from strategic industrial policy is the absence of discipline. China's Xi Jinping deploys armies of technocrats executing a coherent technological superiority strategy. Trump lacks the attention span for that. Eduardo Porter's analysis lands on a more fitting comparison: Putin's Russia, or the Latin American dictators the US once backed — Duvalier in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua — who viewed government as a family enrichment vehicle. Trump's crypto dealings suggest the same orientation. Marx himself provides the diagnostic framework, though not the one Trump's supporters imagine. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was written to show how class struggle "created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." The parallel is uncomfortable because it fits. Hendrix offers one reason for cautious optimism: Putin consolidated autocratic control over a primitive, oil-based economy. Doing the same in a complex modern economy with distributed productive capacity is structurally harder. You cannot simply seize the oil to run the place. Whether that structural resistance holds is the question that matters now.
