Donald Trump: Economic Socialist

The latest socialist turn from our non-socialist socialist president is his badgering of gas retailers to lower prices to $2.50 a gallon. Surely even the most naïve among us can see that gas retailers were not responsible for the spike in prices. It was the result of the president launching his undeclared war on Iran. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots between the pre-war prices and the war prices. Does the president think we’re fools?

Yet he wants to shift the blame and find a convenient scapegoat. Aha — the gas companies! Trump told gasoline retailers they “must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY!” to around $2.50 per gallon. He also threatened the “big Oil Companies” and ordered his “Justice” Department to investigate them for price gouging. Good grief. Did we actually elect Bernie Sanders? Trump should be ashamed of himself — but shame was never his strong suit.

Aiming his ire at retailers is misplaced. Retailers are price takers, not price setters. They don’t “price gouge.” Many are mom-and-pop operations that make most of their money on beverages and snacks rather than at the pump. But by blaming “Big Oil,” Trump is merely following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who did the same thing. Only this time, the president himself is the culprit. Trump must be a fan of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who introduced the Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2025, a bill that grants the federal government authority to regulate and criminalize price gouging — however defined.

This isn’t the first time the president has flirted with price-fixing socialism. Remember his crusade against Big Pharma to set drug prices? Trump, like all good economic socialists, loves to cast corporations as greedy capitalists profiting off the public. Yet here, it is Trump himself who bears responsibility for disrupting the global supply chain. Mamdani freezes rent in New York. Trump took a page from that same playbook when he went after credit card companies, proposing an interest rate cap by posting on Truth Social: “Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%. Please be informed that we will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies.” Mamdani must be proud.

Then there’s the matter of the government taking stakes in private corporations — socialists want to control of the means of production. The federal government now holds a 9.9% stake in Intel, 5% in Lithium Americas, 5% in the Thacker Pass joint venture, up to 8% in Westinghouse, 7.5% in MP Materials, 10% in Trilogy Metals, stock options in ReElement Technologies, and $50 million in equity and stock options in Vulcan Elements. Again, did we elect Bernie Sanders?

Trump’s kinship with the socialists only runs through their economics making him an economic socialist not a social socialist. Trump does not want to make DC and Puerto Rico states, eliminate the Electoral College, open the borders, defund the police, ban fossil fuels, have “free” universal healthcare, cut military fund and all the rest of the socialist’s domestic wish list. But Trump is no Ronald Reagan who warned: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” What Trump is doing is taking baby steps toward more socialism in American corporate life – Reagan be damned! But Reagan was right. Instead Donald Trump is an economic socialist. He is a neo-socialist.