Since regaining the presidency, Donald Trump has doubled down on his cheesy idea that the United States needs a CEO, while illustrating with each day why he certainly isn’t the person for the job. Success in a business is measured by the deals the boss closes and by the results the following quarter, but in a country the goals are obviously different: key among them are the defending civil rights, supporting public assets and maintaining the balance between competing interests. So when the president decides that national security or industrial policy are auctions in which he sets the “commission,” we’re dealing with corruption.
Take two recent, largely overlooked, episodes: Trump has demanded that Nvidia and AMD pay the government 15% of their chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses; and is now considering a government stake in struggling Intel, the United States’ only advanced chip maker, but which has missed out on the AI boom due to management missteps. Rumors of a deal sent Intel’s share price up, but the message it sends is that everything depends on Intel playing ball. That is not technology policy: it is turning technology policy into pay-to-play.
On August 7, six months after Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO at Intel, Trump demanded his head on a plate, alleging he was “conflicted” due to his ties to several Chinese companies. Four days later, he sat down with Tan in the Oval office, and then issued a statement highlighting Tan’s “fascinating story”. Now, not only was there no longer any conflict, but talks began for the US government to take a stake in Intel, the idea being to speed up the construction of its factories in Ohio, which have been delayed. Can you imagine the “entrepreneurial freedom” that remains when your regulator is also your shareholder and your customer? All of this may seem normal in Trumpland, but in any minimally mature democracy, that really is a conflict of interest.
The same logic governs the AMD and Nvidia deal: the government lifts its export veto on H20 chips to China in return for a 15% cut, having started out demanding 20%. National security experts consider it a strategic mistake the lawyers suggest it’s anti-Constitutional. Nevertheless, the deal goes ahead, which is all that matters for the “CEO-in-chief”. If tomorrow Blackwell decides to “downgrade” it to sell it as well, the only negotiable thing will be the percentage.
We shouldn’t be surprised at these shenanigans: Trump has been boasting for years that “America needs a CEO.” The problem his terrible record. His companies have repeatedly filed for bankruptcy, including several casinos (wasn’t it that the house always wins? Not when Trump is the CEO) and a bogus university which had to pay out $25 million to avoid multiple fraud lawsuits. This is the “model” that he now intends to apply to the budget and the law. The taxpayer is now is now Trump’s ATM.
Governing is not managing a profit and loss account. The great Strategy professor Henry Mintzberg explained it years ago: a country cannot be “run like a company” because its mission is not to maximize profits or choose customers, but to serve everyone, including those who do not vote for you. Incentives in a democracy are deliberately slower and more complex, which is why there are counterweights that a CEO would never accept. If you do away with them, you don’t get agility, simply inefficient authoritarianism.
Trump’s recently announced “America First Antitrust” plumbs the depths of double standards: dismantling corporate supervision, neutralizing regulators, pardoning abuses… and selling it as competition policy. It’s not anti-trust, it’s free bar for his friends. It is simply a matter of eliminating regulatory independence and rewriting the rules in favor of the usual suspects: in other words, repaying the debts he contracted in his highly leveraged electoral campaign.
Why do technology companies go along with this? Because they’ve done the math. Nvidia, AMD and even Apple have discovered the joys of transactional government: you can just pay to stay out of trouble: a percentage here, a tariff exemption there, and in exchange, a temporary pass to continue selling or assembling whatever or wherever you want. If the price of avoiding a tariff war is paying a cut to the Treasury, then that’s just the cost of doing business. The damage, however, is systemic: it normalizes corruption.
It’s not just pay-to-play, it’s pay-to-govern. When the president demands a piece of TikTok or suspends a bipartisan law overwhelmingly approved by Congress that forces its sale while blessing a related consortium, he is not “thinking like a businessman”: he is using the White House to haggle. If today 50% of a platform is requested to “protect” national security, tomorrow a percentage of any merger, sanction or license will be requested. That is not an entrepreneurial state: it is a state at the service of the boss.
Talk about conflicts of interest: the same president who decides on tariffs, exemptions and licenses holds positions in technology companies that benefit from these policies or enriches himself by investing in cryptocurrencies whose price he controls with legislative decrees. It does not matter if it is managed by a family trust: in any mature democracy these maneuvers would be enough to disqualify a political leader. In today’s United States, on the other hand, it is exhibited as a supposed virtue of “alignment” with industry. For most civilized countries, American policy is now seen as simply grotesque.
This is the background framework of what I described months ago: the authoritarian efficiency with which Big Tech and Trump have dismantled democratic counterweights. If the regulator becomes a partner, if the tariff replaces the norm and if politics is used as leverage against judges and agencies, there is no longer a market or a valid state: there is only power. The rest is marketing.
The argument that this is the only way the United States can protect its interests doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: the same security experts who stood up to Trump in the first administration, now warn that licensing the sale of weakened chips to China in return for a cut simply erodes the United States’ technological advantage and gives time to the competitor. The difference between strategy and a transaction is simple: the former orders means to ends; the second auctions them to the highest bidder.
Good politics shields itself against perverse incentives rather than institutionalizing them. A president can and should talk to business, but it can’t charge them for complying with the law. A democracy can invest in a critical industry, but not engage in buying stock packages as blackmail. And of course it can use tariffs, but not as a shortcut sold at a price. To call that “thinking like a CEO” is to insult good CEOs… and taxpayers.
Trump insists on acting like a CEO, despite his disastrous record as a businessman, which means the the United States is in the hands of the worst possible manager. A country does not need a CEO: it needs laws and counterweights that are not up for sale to the highest bidder, and these can only be guaranteed if the person in charge is honest and seen to be so.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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