OP-ED

Trump’s Big-Government Trap

His rampant interventionism provides a gift to the next progressive administration.

By Robert H. Bork Jr. & Mark W. Davis
May 1, 2026 6:30 AM

President Trump calls his stream-of-consciousness rhetorical style “the weave.” Conservatives should pay more attention to the president’s ideological style, a weave between conservative free-market and constitutional principles, and major steps into state-run capitalism, the crass use of regulatory authority to punish speech, and executive orders that bludgeon individuals and groups for their politics.

We acknowledge and celebrate the president’s big wins — closing the border, lowering taxes, stripping away deadweight regulation, and unleashing America’s energy might. These bright spots (and some are very bright) cannot distract us from the way in which Trump is erecting a guillotine for those who still value free speech and free enterprise, shielded from government control.

Charles Dickens called that execution machine introduced by the French Revolution “the National Razor which shaves close.” Conservatives especially should prepare themselves for a very close shave when the Democrats return to power. The Democrats are ever more dominated by far-left progressives, certain to use this weapon against conservatives and whatever remaining center-left Democrats when they are back in the White House. This is not a guess but a straight-line extrapolation of their behavior.

A few examples: During the Biden administration, social media platforms were pressured into censoring and shadow-banning conservative speech. Biden’s people funneled taxpayer money through a State Department “Global Engagement Center” to a London-based NGO that scared advertisers away from right-leaning American media, including such dangerous entities as Reason magazine.

The Biden administration encouraged corporate ESG, DEI, and the replacement of equality with “equity.” They appeared unconcerned (or worse) that academia — long a home for leftist and sometimes ultra-leftist orthodoxy — became arenas for struggle sessions among dissenters that had a way of ending unhappily. President Biden continued to forgive student-loan debt despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling it unconstitutional, and coerced U.S. automakers into making electric vehicles that Americans didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

President Trump ran in 2024 promising to set a new course. Since he came into office, this has not always been so.

For example, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission chairman, Andrew Ferguson, sent a “warning letter” to Apple CEO Tim Cook, threatening him over Apple News’ curation of news sources. “The FTC is not the speech police,” Ferguson proclaimed, saying he acted only because Apple News’ choice of sources violated its terms and conditions. Yet a close reading of those terms explicitly disclaims responsibility for content accuracy.

That’s an argument not too far removed from one made by Tim Wu, a major critic of Big Tech in the Biden White House, who recently penned a piece in the New York Times arguing that social media isn’t just speech but is instead “a defective, hazardous product.” As the Trump administration evolves, the arguments of Carr and Ferguson in favor of enforcing consumer protection standards against First Amendment activities dovetail with those of Wu. The right and the left are beginning to agree that speech is a product that should be regulated, not a fundamental right that must be protected.

The president has also attacked the First Amendment directly by leveling executive orders against law firms with former partners or associates who had worked against him. By threatening to cut off their access to security clearances and federal buildings, including possibly courthouses, the president has extracted promises of nearly a billion dollars’ worth of pro bono legal work for his favored causes.

In business, the administration is mixing public monies with private investment. Among other examples, the government obtained a minority stake in Intel and a so-called “golden share” of U.S. Steel, extracted cuts of international sales by Nvidia and AMD in return for relieving export controls, and crafted bespoke policies to guide the business strategies of corporations. The president has personally demanded the removal of the Intel CEO and a Netflix board member. At times, he has seemed to act as a sort of corporate director, laying the foundations for state capitalism. As we have seen from earlier incarnations of industrial policy — from U.S. Steel to Solyndra, and in China today — the politicization of capital always distorts markets and ends in tears.

The administration’s antitrust policy also seems to be taking a statist turn. For almost half a century, antitrust policy has been guided by the “consumer welfare standard,” which takes the politics out of regulatory enforcement by evaluating mergers and acquisitions based on their impact on consumer prices, choice, and innovation. Inexplicably, President Trump’s antitrust regulators failed to restore this modest standard. Instead, they retained the merger guidelines of the progressive antitrust regime of Biden’s progressive FTC chair, Lina Khan. The result is a hybrid “America First” antitrust policy that sounds conservative but, like the approach adopted in the Biden-Khan era, embraces the use of antitrust to direct the economy from Washington.

Donald Trump could have been the restorer of free markets. Instead, his administration is institutionalizing mechanisms that Washington can use to meddle in the operations of private business.

The president’s defenders will respond that the left has proven ruthless and lawless in its quest to maintain and expand power — a case only strengthened by the recent menacing comments by Democratic strategist James Carville. They argue that a Republican president who truly would be “the restorer of free markets” might be committing unilateral disarmament, a defeatist and largely nonsensical argument that ignores the extent to which the protection of free markets can be reinforced both legally and institutionally. (To be fair, this effort would require a more active Congress than we have at the moment.)

True unilateral disarmament would be leaving tools on the table that the left would likely use in a far more hostile manner. For conservatives, from a practical point of view, smoothing the pathways of predatory power will only allow Democrats to complete the job in the future, while undercutting Republicans’ moral authority to fight back.

Although these dangers are real, such partisan considerations risk overlooking the greater peril: If both parties finally give up on free-market capitalism and limited government, then it really does not matter much which party is in power. The differences would no longer be quite so ideological, but cultural and tribal. A conflict between two parties unmoored from what we can consider constitutional Americanism would signal a break with the last 237 years of shared assumptions regarding the character and principles of this nation.

Regardless of whether the Republican Party retains its principles, Trump’s interventionism is a gift to the next progressive administration. Conservatives should be deeply worried about the guillotine that the president and his people are setting up in the plaza. As with the radical Jacobins, it is sure to be used against those who installed it.