“US to take 10% equity stake in Intel, in Trump's latest corporate move.”
That was the headline from Reuters, which makes this all seem like business as usual. But it’s not. Today on the show, Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan J. Demas asked Lincoln Project COO Jeff Timmer, a former longtime Republican, if this is communism.
“This is, when you think about authoritarian fascism — the Mussolinis, the Francos, the Pinochets — this is what it looks like,” he said.
This is what corruption in government looks like.
And what this definitely isn’t is free-market capitalism — which was what Republicans said for decades they believed in. But, as Stuart Stevens pointed out in his book, It was All a Lie. Once Trump came on the scene, a lot of Republicans lost their way and lost their values. The principled ones — like Stuart, and Jeff, and Rick Wilson — refused to sell out. And that’s how the Lincoln Project was born.
"If the shoe was on the other foot, if this was Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Bill Clinton demanding that U.S. companies pay a share of ownership to the federal government — these people would be losing their freaking minds,” noted Jeff.
Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to send troops to other Democratic cities like Baltimore and Chicago, after dispatching them to L.A. and Washington, D.C.
"It's not: 'Can it happen here?’” Jeff said. “It is happening here. It's: 'What are we going to do about it?'"
It’s clear that Trump’s moves are an intimidation campaign in the runup to the 2026 election — and he’s still desperately trying to distract from the Epstein files.
"If these files exonerated Donald Trump, we would see them,” Jeff said. “That simple. Occam's razor is the clear answer here."
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