RCP’s Phil Wegmann asked President Trump at a White House event on Monday whether the U.S. government taking partial ownership of Intel is a bit hypocritical after campaigning against Kamala Harris as a “communist.”

PHIL WEGMANN, REALCLEARPOLITICS: During the campaign, you called Kamala Harris a communist. But the Biden-Harris administration, they never called for nationalizing a private company with the federal government like you’re proposing with Intel. What do you say to some who call this a bit hypocritical? And is this the new way of doing industrial policy? PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, sure it is. I want to try and get as much as I can. If people come in and they need something… as an example, as a real estate person, if I have an agreement, and I have any form of a stopgap where I can stop somebody from doing something-right? I have a covenant in an agreement, and they come to me and say, I would like to do something, but you have us restricted. If I do that, they usually have to pay. Now, in the case of Intel, it was interesting. But I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it. Intel came in. I met with a gentleman. I had a lot of respect for him. He came in under a little bit of a cloud. I liked his story. I thought he was good. I think he really means to do a good job with Intel. I said I’d like to ask whether or not you’d give-because a lot of people said I invested in it. I didn’t invest, but I invest my heart in it and my soul, because I want the country to be strong. But I said, I’d like you to give 10% of Intel to the United States of America. Not to me-to the United States of America. And I said, if you have them as a partner, if you have the United States as a partner, I think that would be a very good thing for Intel. And he thought about it a little bit different, and he said, I like that idea very much. We have a deal. And that’s… I just made $ 10 billion or $ 11 billion for the United States of America. And yeah, there will be other cases where if I have that opportunity again, I would do that. And then, you know, you do have stupid people say, Oh, that’s a shame. It’s not a shame. It’s called business. If somebody’s willing to give you 10% of a company and you’re not paying for it… and I will tell you, with a company like Intel-as you know, it’s had difficulty-I want them to do well. I want them to do well anyway, but I want them to do well in particular. PHIL WEGMANN: But isn’t public ownership of a private company a new way of doing business in the business of the United States? Isn’t that what you were so- DONALD TRUMP: Tariffs. So, as you know, the stock market went up almost 1,000 points on Friday. And it went up not because of this very-hello, who’s that? Who is that back there? Get out of the room. It went up because of something much different. It went up because it was announced-CBO announced the numbers. And as you know, they gave no credit to tariffs. They said they made a mistake, that the trade deficit will be reduced because of Trump’s tariffs, will be reduced by $ 4 trillion. Right? Is that what they said? They said $ 4 trillion. And the market went up like a rocket ship, because the tariffs are good. Well, tariffs aren’t that usual. If the seven wars I stopped-four of them were because of the fact that I had tariffs on trade. And I was able to say, Well, if you do this, if you go fight and you want to kill everybody, that’s OK, but I’m going to charge you each 100% tariff when you trade with us. You know what? They all gave up. I stopped seven wars. Numerous of them were because of tariffs. So you never knew the word tariff. It didn’t exist, really, essentially in this country until-actually, in the 1870s up until 1913 it existed. And we were the richest country. We were richer, proportionately, than at any time in the history of our country. And then, stupidly, in 1913 they said, Let’s go to the income tax way of life. Let the people pay instead of foreign countries. Now we’re taking in trillions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re stopping wars because of tariffs. So that’s not normal either. But you know what? Other countries did it to us, and now we’re doing it to other countries.
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