Imagine a powerful president who seizes portions of private business for the state, coerces companies to invest more domestically by threatening penal tariffs if they don’t comply, expands big government while disregarding rising debt and deficits, and frequently intervenes in the market economy to promote what he perceives as national interests.

Such a leader would have our dear Corbynistas applauding enthusiastically, encouraging Keir Starmer to follow his lead and behave like genuine socialists. But when that president is Donald Trump, who has taken such actions, the Corbynistas are understandably silent.

However, their silence cannot hide one of today’s often-overlooked truths: Right-wing populists like Trump have more in common with the Left regarding economic policy than with purists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Under Trump, market capitalism – the foundation of America’s power and prosperity – is transitioning to state capitalism where big business serves big government.

Some might say it’s similar to China. And they would be correct – which highlights one of the great ironies of the 21st century. When China joined the global trading system around the 2000s, many experts hoped – even predicted – that increasing contact with the West would gradually make the country more liberal and democratic.

That was a false hope. China under President Xi is, if anything, more repressive today than before its ascent to superpower status. What none of the experts anticipated – and it’s hard to fault them – is that the United States would become more like China. Yet, that is exactly what is unfolding before us.

Unconvinced? Consider Trump’s record in the eight short months since returning to the Oval Office.

Intel, formerly the top chipmaker globally, is a shadow of its former self. The previous Biden administration did what the Left typically does with struggling big businesses: subsidized it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars. A president who truly believed in the market economy would have removed state support. Not Trump. He transformed the Biden subsidies into a 10 percent equity stake in Intel for the federal government.

Intel was given no choice. Its hapless boss, only recently dismissed as useless by Trump, was forced to appear with Trump’s commerce secretary and welcome the federal government’s unwanted $10 billion ‘investment’, looking for all the world like he’d been taken hostage. In a sense he has. Trump will now call the shots at Intel whenever he pleases.

Of course, as is often the case, the state has taken a stake in failure. Nvidia is now the leading US chipmaker, especially in artificial intelligence, with a market value of $4 trillion versus Intel’s ‘mere’ $100 billion. But Trump has his sticky fingers in that, too. He only agreed to an export licence for Nvidia (and AMD, another giant chipmaker) to sell chips to China in return for a 15 per cent cut of the revenues for the Treasury, somehow overcoming previous national security fears about exporting such technology to Beijing.

Like Intel, Nvidia and AMD were left with no choice. But their vulnerability to Trump’s whim is nothing compared with how he has Apple, the famous global giant, by the short and curlies. Trump threatened it with penal tariffs of up to 100 per cent on iPhones and other products it exports to America unless it relocated more of its manufacturing, most of which is in China, to the US.

Apple’s chief, Tim Cook, was forced to agree through gritted teeth to another $100 billion of investments in the US on top of the $500 billion over the next four years he’d already announced to placate Trump. Nobody knows if investment on this scale will ever materialise. Trump seems happy for now. But Cook fears Trump will be back for more. Indeed his appetite for state capitalism is insatiable.

Earlier this year he acquiesced to Nippon Steel’s takeover of US Steel only when the Japanese firm agreed to a government ‘golden share’ in the new company. Since Trump also controls the tariffs it will face from overseas competitors, the President has quite the power to make it do his bidding.

There are more corporate shakedowns in the pipeline. MP Materials, a Nevada-based miner of rare-earth metals, will soon have the Pentagon as its biggest shareholder, on receipt of substantial government aid. Apple has agreed to buy $500 million of rare earth magnets from it, though nobody knows if it would have done so without the constant need to appease Trump. Now you see how state capitalism works.

Trump’s power grab doesn’t stop with corporations. He expects his writ to run everywhere. He has spent months trying to undermine and remove the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which sets interest rates independent of the government, because he wants quicker and deeper rate cuts. He fired the boss of the Bureau of Statistics because he didn’t like the figures she was producing (it’s made no difference — yesterday’s US jobs numbers were dire).

But it’s not just in economic matters that Trump is aping China. Even more worrying is his tilt towards too many aspects of authoritarian states. China, like all other dictatorships, is awash with nepotism, sycophancy, vendettas against rivals, repression of opponents and the use of military force to keep the population in line. Trump is assiduous in the pursuit of all of that.

Just as China has its ‘red princes’, the privileged offspring of Chinese Communist Party bosses who have accumulated tens of billions over the years for their own use, America has the Trump family, which has enriched itself during Trump’s second term (over $2 billion in the first 112 days by some calculations) through cryptocurrency ventures, international real estate deals, increased profits at properties like Mar-a-Lago, exclusive membership clubs, legal settlements, inauguration funds, Trump merchandise and even a luxury jet from Qatar.

Trump has populated his team with sycophants dedicated to doing his bidding and always ready to feed his narcissism, as those nauseating televised cabinet meetings sickeningly show. One of the worst is Kash Patel, the FBI director, whose 2023 book ‘Government Gangsters’ contained an ‘enemies list’ of 60 who had supposedly tried to thwart Trump.

Patel, in best secret police fashion, seems to be working through the list on Trump’s behalf. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who departed on bad terms and wrote a critical book about the President, has just had his house raided by the FBI in pursuit of classified documents supposed to be in his possession (ironic given Trump’s cavalier handling of secret material at Mar-a-Lago).

Bolton joins a growing roll-call of Trump critics targeted for retaliatory federal investigations, such as James Comey, former FBI director, John Brennan, former CIA director, and Miles Taylor, an ex-senior homeland security official, all of whom crossed Trump.

The list goes on. Unable to force out the chairman of the Fed, Trump has tried to fire a Fed governor, Lisa Cook. She has refused to go quietly. So the administration is looking at criminal charges against her. Nor has he given up on ousting the chairman. Trump’s people are looking at a lawsuit against him for an overrun in the cost of renovating the Fed’s headquarters.

Nobody is safe. New York State attorney general Letitia James faces a federal criminal investigation involving properties she owns in two states. James was one of several legal officers pursuing Trump for various infractions. The case she brought against him cost $500 million. No surprise Trump wants revenge.

Politically motivated vendettas. Revenge against opponents. Rule by executive order. The National Guard deployed on the streets of the nation’s capital and soon, perhaps, other major cities too. State capitalism trumping the market economy. These have become the hallmarks of Trump’s second administration, which increasingly amounts to the Sinofication of America.

Of course there is a case for some of what he’s attempting under, and some will say he’s only doing to others what they tried to do him. Perhaps. But America’s greatness is based on its reputation for freedom and belief in the market economy. America will not be made great again by undermining either — and certainly not by ditching both.