ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President Trump is turning up the heat on corporate America. In the past week, Trump attacked two executives who are not household names and announced a revenue-sharing deal with chip company NVIDIA. NPR business correspondent Maria Aspan reports on the stakes for American companies and the wider economy.
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: President Trump's latest attacks on big companies are leaving experts at a loss, even people like Meena Bose of Hofstra University, who runs a center studying the American presidency.
MEENA BOSE: I don't know that anyone can claim to be an expert because we're in kind of uncharted territory (laughter).
ASPAN: Terms like uncharted territory and unprecedented have been thrown around a lot this year to describe how Trump is wielding power during his second term.
BOSE: In some ways, almost kind of a rejection of precedent.
ASPAN: Now, Trump is tightening his control over Wall Street and corporate America. In the past week, he called for Intel's CEO to resign, before backtracking. Then he criticized Goldman Sachs' CEO and called for him to fire the company's top economist, who's pointed out what many others have - that Trump's tariffs will raise prices. Intel and Goldman declined to discuss this with NPR.
Perhaps most shocking, Trump announced an unprecedented deal with NVIDIA, which will pay the U.S. government a cut of its revenues for one of its computer chips in exchange for being allowed to sell it in China.
RYAN BOURNE: Now, that isn't really free markets as Americans have understood it. It's almost political fee markets.
ASPAN: Ryan Bourne is an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
BOURNE: It doesn't surprise me that businesses are going down this route of trying to make deals with the president. But in the longer term, this type of thing fundamentally corrupts the purpose of business, which should be about creating value for customers and ultimately shareholders.
ASPAN: Bourne is in good company with these fears. On Monday, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal warned that Trump is imitating the Chinese Communist Party and turning the U.S. economy into something like China's government-controlled state capitalism. Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld calls this MAGA Marxism. He's a management professor who regularly meets with CEOs, and he says that they're terrified about what Trump is doing to American capitalism.
JEFFREY SONNENFELD: So that means we have winners and losers based on cronyism or various preferences.
ASPAN: The free market has traditionally been the backbone of American companies and the massive U.S. economy. Now Trump is trying to bend it to his political will. But most CEOs think it's too risky for any one company to stand up to Trump. Sonnenfeld instead advises them to take a page from their workers by organizing together.
SONNENFELD: The only way you take down a bully is through collective action. They can't do it on their own.
ASPAN: There hasn't been a lot of that yet. A White House spokesperson didn't address the concerns about cronyism or state-controlled capitalism. He told NPR via email that President Trump's hands-on leadership is paving the way towards a new golden age for America. But those who study the presidency have stopped trying to predict what's next. At the end of my conversation with Meena Bose, I asked her my usual last question - what else should I be thinking about?
BOSE: Oh, I wish I could tell you.
(LAUGHTER)
BOSE: I mean, what comes next? What will tomorrow bring?
ASPAN: That's something that even the country's most powerful business leaders are now asking.
Maria Aspan, NPR News, New York.
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