Several years ago, I had a job with a parts supplier in the automotive industry (not an uncommon experience for us Michiganders). It was the early 2010s, the industry beginning to recover from the devastation of the Great Recession. I was in a conference room with some engineers with the normal pre-meeting chatter.
One guy mentioned something about a contract we had with General Motors. But then another guy jumped in to say that there shouldn't even be a General Motors, that GM should have been allowed to go bankrupt and dispersed. And then he got very animated about free market capitalism and the slippery slope of Marxist socialism and how the federal government was generally bad if not evil. There was a brief pause (a sort of acknowledgement of a "well that escalated quickly" moment), and then the meeting got started.
I was thinking about that guy when I saw the news the other day about President Donald Trump's desire for the U.S. government to own a piece of troubled chipmaker Intel. What would he think about that? How would he reconcile his steadfast ideology with a president (who I'm guessing he voted for) actively violating it?
And it's not like this is a one-off violation. Two weeks ago, Trump was openly demanding that the Intel CEO be fired. Recently, he may have crossed some legal lines in a deal to charge Nvidia and AMD a fee to secure export licenses to sell AI chips to China. And of course there is the endless tariff declarations and market manipulations.
So I'm curious. But mostly, I'm glad not to be in meetings with that guy anymore.
Editor's note: John Auchter is a freelance political cartoonist. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Public, its management, or its license holder, the University of Michigan.
