MAGA to Marxism 2.0: Trump's Latest Moves Bury Free Markets Under State Control
Despite all his talk of "America First" and draining the swamp, President Trump is acting like a pure socialist—using government power to seize control over private property, markets, and foreign resources. This is not the first time I've written about this central theme on TaxPolitix.com. As far back as June 25, 2025, in my post "From MAGA to Marxism: Trump's Nationalization of US Steel", I called out his imposition of a "golden share" in the U.S. Steel–Nippon Steel deal as straight-up nationalization, giving the White House veto power over board decisions, plant operations, and investments—turning a private merger into state-supervised control and a "massive leap toward economic socialism, wrapped in a flag." And to prove the point, Trump has already overruled a board decision to halt operations at the Granite City plant in Illinois by demanding that the transition not take place.
In just the past week, the pattern has accelerated. Trump announced steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, claiming "people live in homes, not corporations." This direct government interference blocks free-market transactions, restricts property ownership, and overrides voluntary contracts between buyers and sellers—classic state dictation over capital, the opposite of libertarian respect for individual rights. Not to mention that institutional investors own only about 1-3% of the nation's single-family homes, too trivial to have any meaningful effect on prices—showing he didn't even bother with basic research. Top aide Stephen Miller declared the U.S. could take Greenland militarily, stating "nobody's going to fight the United States" over it—floating outright seizure instead of negotiation or trade. Trump has asserted indefinite U.S. control over Venezuela's oil sales after ousting Maduro, dictating where crude goes and how proceeds are spent to benefit America.
Domestically, we've seen this before: the government secured a nearly 10% stake in Intel by converting subsidies into equity, giving Washington influence over corporate strategy. Add blanket tariffs that tax imports, raise consumer costs, and distort prices to favor select industries—as I've repeatedly critiqued in pieces like "Trump's Tariff 'Dividend' Fantasy: A Nightmare for Liberty" (November 23, 2025) and "Sorry, MAGA Crowd: Reagan Meant What He Said about Tariffs"(October 29, 2025)—and the list shows heavy-handed intervention everywhere. These actions expand bureaucracy, crush competition, and bury free-market principles under government thumbs on the scale. From housing bans to resource grabs and corporate ownership, Trump's moves pile up into command-and-control economics—the very socialist tendencies conservatives and libertarians have fought for decades. Somebody's got to stop this before economic freedom gets lost in more red tape and state power.
And it's also quite likely that these actions are responsible for the ongoing decline of Trump's favorability ratings.