As 2026 gets underway, Trump is applying this same perspective to other businesses. The New York Times reported:

Ahead of a scheduled signing of executive orders [on Wednesday afternoon], President Trump said that he would move to cut pay for the executives in the defense industry, and ban stock buybacks and the issuing of dividends for those companies. It is unclear how that could be enforced, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for details.

Specifically, the Republican said by way of his social media platform that he envisions what would be effectively a salary cap for executives at defense contractors: “No Executive should be allowed to make in excess of $5 Million Dollars” unless they make the changes to production plants that Trump wants to see......

What’s more, it keeps happening. The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip published a provocative analysis on this last summer:

A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China. Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the ‘golden share’ Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.

Ip’s report added that it would be wrong to characterize this as “socialism,” because it more closely resembles “state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”.....

A couple of weeks before Election Day 2024, The New York Times’ editorial board published a memorable piece with a straightforward headline: “American Business Cannot Afford to Risk Another Trump Presidency.”

The editors all but pleaded with private sector leaders to recognize the looming dangers of a second term for Trump. “Voting on narrow policy concerns would reflect a catastrophically nearsighted view of the interests of American business,” they wrote, adding that business owners should be “afraid of the consequences if he prevails.”

More than a year later, as the president intervenes in private businesses in ways that defy modern American norms, those warnings appear prescient in retrospect.