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The U.S. government is now the largest shareholder of Intel. Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, ordered a 10% stake in the beleaguered U.S. chipmaker earlier this week, in a move that breaks with the Republican Party’s free market orthodoxy and has drawn rebukes from conservatives who otherwise support the president.

Trump cast the move as a shrewd investment that will make the United States “richer and richer” and said he hopes it is the first of many such deals. “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it,” he said. Trump’s move, with roots in a technology grant program put in place by his predecessor Joe Biden, represents a turn toward a state-centered approach to economic policy, a strategy that some 30 years ago went by the name of industrial policy.

Will this be called socialism? The intellectual battle over this issue has come down to a question of semantics. For generations of economists, socialism has at least in part been defined as the government’s control of the means of production for the collective benefit of society. “By that standard,” as the late Michael A. Osinski wrote when President Obama ordered Chrysler and General Motors taken over in 2009, “there’s nothing especially un-socialist about what’s happening here.”

Trump’s move could have the effect of nationalizing Intel. The political hypocrisy of the development is not lost on some observers. When President Obama engineered a government takeover of Chrysler and GM because it was necessary to rescue iconic American businesses from financial collapse, the move was accepted by conservatives as an emergency bailout of the auto industry. Had Obama opted to take a 10% stake in Intel, however, the president’s allies say conservative media would have portrayed it as an effort to nationalize communism in America.

But Trump says this is different. In his telling, the Intel move is an investment, not a bailout. He also took credit for converting nearly $9 billion in grants, taxpayer funds that had already been committed to Intel under Biden’s bipartisan Chips Act, into equity for the government. By taking the equity stake, Trump claimed he produced between $10 billion and $11 billion in “immediate value” for taxpayers. “Why are ‘stupid’ people unhappy with that?” Trump asked.

Prominent conservatives reacted with horror. Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former top economic adviser, said the proposal made him “very, very uncomfortable.” Steve Moore, another informal Trump economic adviser, was blunter: “I hate corporate welfare. That’s privatization in reverse. We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets. So terrible, one of the bad ideas that’s come out of this White House,” Moore wrote.

National Review ran an editorial cautioning that “government shouldn’t get into the chip business.” Senator Thom Tillis called the move “disturbing,” warning that the deal “risks creating a semi-state-owned enterprise a la CCCP.” The reference is to the former Soviet Union. Senator Rand Paul piled on in a tweet: “Wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea.”

Other voices were more supportive of Trump’s move. Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders lauded the decision. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who served in the Trump administration, jumped to the former president’s defense, telling Laura Ingraham on her eponymous program that “That is not socialism. That’s the best businessman in the United States of America in the Oval Office doing fair things for us.”

Intel itself also warned that the move would come with costs. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that the arrangement might hurt its ability to attract future government grants and make it harder for the company to make global sales. It also said the arrangement could subject the company to more regulation. Intel, which has announced this year that it will lay off 15% of its workforce, currently has a market value of around $110 billion, which is down 50% so far this year. Its shares rose 4% immediately after Trump’s announcement, but are down again as of press time.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump initially wanted Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign because of previous ties to Chin,a but changed his mind following a face-to-face meeting at the White House. “I liked him a lot, I thought he was very good,” Trump said following the meeting.

Trump told Ingraham that the U.S. government, as the company’s largest shareholder, will have “no voice, no vote, nothing” in Intel’s affairs. Few believe that. When the president of the United States becomes the largest shareholder of any company, he or she will inevitably be asked for his opinion. For Trump’s supporters, a recovered Intel will be a crowning achievement of a re-energized America in which state and industry work hand-in-hand. For his critics, a struggling Intel will mean a new tax bill for a new generation of Americans. Trump, meanwhile, says he is not done. “It could be 10 and it could be 20, and we’re going to get to that point very soon,” Trump said of future equity stakes in tech companies. But for now, the debate is over what to call it.

Is this socialism? Capitalism? Trumpism? The Intel move represents a fundamental shift in how the federal government and private enterprise do business. The move also underlines just how far Trump has remade the Republican Party’s economic policy agenda.