A new book by Robert Bork Jr., president of the Antitrust Education Project and son of the late federal judge and legal scholar, argues that a strain of what he calls conservative socialism has taken root in the Trump administration, creating a paradox in which self-identified conservatives are adopting redistributionist, central-planning approaches to industrial policy, antitrust enforcement, and government investment that mirror the progressive Democratic policies they claim to oppose. Bork joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to make the case and take some pushback on where the lines should be drawn.
His central examples are concrete. The Trump administration owns a stake in Intel, a stake in Nvidia, and pieces of several rare earth companies. It steers investment, directs industrial policy, manipulates competition, rewards allied firms, and punishes disfavored ones. The administration came close to taking a ninety percent stake in Spirit Airlines as a bailout before the company’s creditors declined and simply sold the planes instead, averting what would have been a government-owned airline. Bork said the Intel stake, which Proft noted would be worth approximately forty billion dollars if sold today against a ten-billion-dollar purchase price, illustrates the seductive appeal of the approach. The ROI looks good. Trump is a better businessman than most. But that is entirely beside the point. The point is what precedent is being set, who gets to call the company’s next time the phone rings, and what decisions get made based on political rather than economic logic. He said when markets become politicized, consumers pay for it through regulatory complexity, higher compliance costs, distorted investment, capital inefficiency, and slower innovation.
Bork said the deeper problem is that conservatives who like the current president are making exceptions for policies they would condemn under a different president. The same week the administration was rolling back Biden-era environmental regulations on refrigerators and air conditioners in a genuine deregulatory win, it was simultaneously pursuing industrial policy interventions that are structurally identical to what Democrats do, justified only by the fact that this administration is doing them in service of its preferred political and economic interests rather than theirs. He said you cannot hold that position coherently, and that the precedent being set will be exploited by the next occupant of the office whose politics you do not share. He cited Zohran Mamdani’s property seizure proposals in New York as exactly the kind of thing that becomes easier to justify once the principle of government directing private economic activity for political purposes has been normalized across administrations.
On antitrust specifically, Bork said the Trump antitrust apparatus inherited the Biden apparatus’s approach rather than reversing it, continued Biden antitrust cases that were economically unfounded and losing in court, and has in some respects taken the interventionist approach further. He said legitimate antitrust enforcement exists for genuine price fixing, market manipulation, and restraint of trade, and the government should pursue those aggressively. What it should not do is invent artificial market definitions so that it can characterize successful companies as monopolists, pointing to the Apple smartphone case as an example of prosecutors creating a fictional market called performance smartphones that has no economic basis in order to generate a monopoly finding against a company that is simply very good at what it does.
On the question of national security exceptions, whether industrial policy interventions are justified when the goal is reducing American dependence on Chinese Communist Party-controlled supply chains for critical technologies like semiconductors and rare earths, Bork said his concern is not the goal but the method and the risk of the government expanding its control. He said the government can legitimately reduce regulatory burdens to encourage domestic development, can provide grants as part of a defined and limited program, but should not end up running the chip companies or the data centers because private sector solutions will always outperform government-directed ones over the long run.
On the TikTok situation, Bork said it is a case where the president ignored a law Congress passed requiring divestiture of TikTok’s American operations by a specified date, and that this was wrong regardless of the political rationale. He said he suspects Trump felt TikTok was instrumental to his reelection and was therefore reluctant to enforce the divestiture requirement, and that the pattern of going up to a line and not crossing it for political reasons bears a resemblance to the pattern of going up to the line on Iran and not crossing it, though he acknowledged that comparison might be pushing the analogy too far.