The Golden Share: How Trump Is Cementing Corporate State Power
When I read the Times article on Trump’s “golden share” arrangement with U.S. Steel, I slapped my knee in surprise. This break in four decades of free-market fundamentalism marks a symbolic change and a policy shift.
I wasn’t surprised to find that the historic break failed to align US state power with progressive aims. Instead, Trump’s “golden share” is a perverted form of Keynesian intervention: state socialism for capital, market discipline for everyone else.
For the first time in modern American history, the federal government has taken a permanent equity stake in a private company. That is Big Government – shockingly big if you set the action against Republican orthodoxy since Reagan who fantasized about ‘starving the beast’ and setting markets free.
But this Keynesian intervention is stripped of everything that made his approach progressive: gone are the commitments to full employment, higher corporate taxes, robust federal investment in public goods, and the Fordist-era social contract that shared prosperity with workers.
Trump is pioneering selective state intervention that combines government economic management with regressive wealth redistribution.
The details reveal the scope of this corporate state merger. Trump demanded the golden share last "in perpetuity"—rejecting Nippon Steel's proposal for a three or four-year limit. The president now has direct authority to appoint one of U.S. Steel's three independent directors and veto power over nearly a dozen corporate decisions, from relocating facilities to changing raw material sourcing.
Regardless of how the Trump administration framed this as about jobs, the Steelworkers union—the very workers this is supposedly protecting—opposed the deal, recognizing it as corporate welfare disguised as economic nationalism.
Historically, golden shares emerged in 1980s Britain during Thatcher's privatization wave as a compromise tool—allowing governments to sell state-owned companies while retaining strategic control. Countries like France, Brazil, and China have used them, similarly, typically moving FROM full state ownership TO private ownership with retained government influence.
Trump is doing the reverse. He’s taking a purely private transaction and injecting permanent state control. As one Atlantic Council expert notes, "US Steel may not be state-owned, but it is certainly now controlled by the US government".
Since the 1980s, America has championed free markets globally, criticizing other nations for state intervention and golden shares as market-distorting authoritarianism. European courts have struck down golden shares as violations of free capital movement. U.S. officials have "historically taken issue with these structures, arguing instead for freer markets.”
The irony of Trump’s shift is deep. America has repeatedly challenged other countries' golden share arrangements in trade disputes, with the Commerce Department treating companies with government golden shares as "state-owned enterprises" subject to anti-subsidy penalties.
Now the US has adopted these very policies. But only when they serve corporate interests. While the government guarantees corporate protection from foreign competition, poor families face increasingly punitive work requirements for food assistance. When corporations need protection from market volatility, the state intervenes decisively. When working families need protection from medical bankruptcy, they're told the market will provide.
What this means is that Trump simultaneously pursues unprecedented state control over industry and regressive tax cuts for corporations, funded by cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.
Corporate executives get government equity stakes, and their corporations get million and billion dollar contracts, while working families get means testing and benefit cuts.
Trump supporters see the golden share as fighting for American workers. However, this “golden share” arrangement guarantees neither higher wages, better conditions, nor stronger unions. It prevents neither automation nor AI from eliminating jobs, nor does it ensure profit-sharing.
If the government can claim permanent ownership stakes based on vague "national security" concerns, we're creating systematic state intervention serving only capital interests. This precedent could extend to any industry—tech, defense, energy—but the pattern could remain consistent. Corporations receive state protection while working families face austerity to pay for corporate tax breaks.
The collapse of free-market orthodoxy does create space for genuine alternatives, but only if progressives articulate a fundamentally different vision. Real industrial policy would serve working families and planetary survival through massive economic transformation—green infrastructure creating good jobs, education building skills for a post-carbon economy, and research revolutionizing how we produce and consume. Given the severity of climate projections and the extremity of weather we're already experiencing, incremental change isn't enough. It would include worker representation on corporate boards and tie government support to concrete commitments on wages, benefits, and radical emissions reductions. True economic democracy means state intervention guaranteeing healthcare, housing, and education while rapidly transforming our entire economic system away from fossil fuel dependence—not just subsidizing corporate profitability that accelerates ecological collapse. But that is a pipedream in the current context.
This latest phase of corporate state consolidation is accelerating. What we're witnessing is state capture in reverse—not corporations capturing the state, but the state formalizing its role as capital's enforcer. The fight now is less about whether the state will intervene in the economy and much more about whose interests that intervention will serve.