Dirigiste-in chief: Trump opens the door to ‘state-run capitalism’ | Intel and US Steel deals leave Republican party’s free-market establishment aghast

> When Donald Trump burst on to the American political scene in 2015 he declared himself a free-markets aficionado — with a catch.

> “I’m a free trader 100 per cent,” he told Republicans as he vied for the party’s nomination for the presidency. “But we need smart people making the deals. And we don’t have smart people making the deals.”

> A decade later, seven months into his second term, Trump has taken on that dealmaking role for himself, adopting a transactional approach to the presidency that has upended the US government’s treatment of private enterprise and shattered the Republican party’s free-market philosophy.

> On Friday, the president announced his latest deal: the US government would take a 10 per cent stake in struggling chipmaker Intel, using previously agreed federal grants to fund an $8.9bn equity investment.

> The move cuts directly across Republican orthodoxy, which touts the benefits of free-market capitalism and broadly objects to state interventions into corporate America.

> “For US policy, it’s pretty darn bonkers,” said Scott Lincicome, vice-president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute think-tank.

> “The only time we’ve done this is during war or during the [2007-09] Great Recession, when basically the claim was it’s either this or economic collapse.”

> “It opens the door to a sort of state-run capitalism that we conservatives have typically spoken against,” said Bob Inglis, a former US congressman from South Carolina and self-declared Reagan Republican. “But these are not typical times, and this is not a conservative Republican Party.”