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President Donald Trump has made the federal government the largest shareholder of Intel, ordering a 10% stake in the American semiconductor company last week. Conservatives who normally support the president are criticizing the move as a breach of Republican orthodoxy.

“It is a market intervention that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “In normal times, Republicans would howl. But this is a rare intervention by a president who would rather have voters forget about economic policy.”

It was unclear this week what the government’s 7.5 million shares would be worth, but they give it a 16.7% ownership stake, enough to make the government Intel’s largest shareholder. Trump ordered the move after Intel signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with the U.S. government last month to expand its manufacturing and announced plans to use the federal funding to move its headquarters to Germany. After Trump’s intervention, the company canceled the move and reaffirmed it would remain headquartered in the United States.

Trump has praised the move, saying the federal government now has an investment that will “make us richer and richer.” “It’s a smart thing to do,” Trump said. “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it.”

The action appears to signal a major shift in Trump’s thinking on the economy and, if it becomes a trend, is likely to have a major impact on the country. Trump appears to be adopting the economic approach that during his presidency economists derisively called industrial policy, a 20th-century idea that involved government trying to shape and direct large private industries. Today’s leaders of the industrial-policy movement, in the Biden administration and Congress, are calling for federal spending on research, incentives for American production, and other tools to ensure U.S. competitiveness in technology and manufacturing.

To Trump critics, the question is: Does this cross the line into socialism? Socialism has historically been defined in part as government ownership of the means of production and government ownership of industry for the benefit of the public. By that standard, Trump’s action this week is little different from what takes place in China, Russia, or, for that matter, almost any other country in the world.

Of course, it is also the opposite of the traditional Republican approach to the economy, and many conservatives have spoken out in recent days.

“Very, very uncomfortable with that idea,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former top economic adviser, told Fox Business. Steve Moore, another of Trump’s informal economic advisers, was more blunt, telling Fox News, “I hate corporate welfare. That’s privatization in reverse. We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets. So terrible, one of the bad ideas that’s come out of this White House.”

The editorial board of the conservative magazine National Review was particularly scathing. “Government shouldn’t get into the chip business,” it wrote. “Business should make that decision.” Senator Thom Tillis called the deal a risk to American leadership in tech and a potential “semi-state-owned enterprise a la CCCP,” invoking the Soviet Union. Senator Rand Paul echoed that sentiment on social media: “Wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea.”

The decision to make the U.S. government Intel’s largest shareholder has its defenders. The announcement was a boon for Trump ally Senator Bernie Sanders, who celebrated on social media, contrasting the move with federal subsidies to foreign companies, and argued it was “the president using the power of his office to shape the economy for the benefit of all working people.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick rushed to the former president’s defense on Fox News. “I have to tell you that that is not socialism. That’s the best businessman in the United States of America in the Oval Office doing fair things for us.”

Intel, for its part, said it had no idea the deal was coming, warning in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week that Trump’s move was likely to have multiple negative impacts on the business. They included making it more difficult for the company to get future grants, harming sales to foreign countries, and bringing “additional government oversight and regulation to our business.” Intel, which has already faced turbulence this year and announced a 15% workforce reduction earlier this month, was valued at about $110 billion before Trump’s announcement; since the start of 2024, it has lost 50% of its market capitalization. Shares did rise 4% immediately after Trump’s announcement.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Trump had demanded the resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan as a condition for ending his objections over Tan’s past relationship with China. Tan later flew to the White House and met Trump in person, after which the president backed down and praised Tan.

The federal government will not interfere with Intel’s business, says Trump. The government will be a “nonvoting shareholder, just like you, just like you own,” he said on Tuesday. Many, however, have pointed out that when the president of the United States becomes the largest shareholder in a company, it is difficult to see how that influence would not flow in the other direction.

If Intel stabilizes and its business recovers, Trump will take the credit for saving an American tech icon. If not, the U.S. government will have lost billions, and taxpayers will have to foot the bill. The question now is not whether Trump will do more deals like this in the future, but whether he can.

As one former Trump economic adviser told The Hill: “The irony is we already told those people on Fox [News] when President Obama was president, never to nationalize a company that’s losing money and breaking up its CEO. And if President Obama had done what Trump did and nationalized Intel, Fox would be screaming socialists and communists and everything else. We will never call Trump a socialist.”

At the very least, the Intel stake, as CNBC writer Andrew Edmonson noted, “fundamentally changes the relationship between the federal government and private business” in the United States and shows how much Trump has moved the Republican Party away from the economic principles he once espoused.