Trump’s Pentagon just became the majority shareholder in America’s only rare-earths mine. Where’s the Republican outrage?View this email in your browser [link removed]
[link removed]
**JULY 17, 2025**
**On the
**Prospect **website**
[link removed]
Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz [link removed]
Incompetent and militarized ‘emergency response’ is on track to be a trillion-dollar industry by the end of Trump’s second term.
**BY MAUREEN TKACIK** [link removed]
[link removed]
How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? [link removed]
The malfunctioning xAI chatbot provides some insights into how large language models work.
**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]
[link removed]
Gutting the Student Loan Program [link removed]
The budget bill’s assault on universities, students, parents—and gift for Wall Street.
**BY ROBERT KUTTNER** [link removed]
****Meyerson on TAP****
**Fear Government Control of Markets? It’s Trump, Not Mamdani, Who’s Your Problem.**
**Trump’s Pentagon just became the majority shareholder in America’s only rare-earths mine. Where’s the Republican outrage?**
New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has provoked accusations of impending communism by his proposal to build five municipally owned grocery stores in neighborhoods that are food deserts. To New York’s hedge fund moguls and Republicans everywhere, the specter of Stalinism looms behind this modest attempt to address market failure. Today, fresh fruits and vegetables; tomorrow, the gulag—or something like that.
No such cries have arisen, however, in response to the news that the Pentagon has become the majority shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the only rare-earths mine in the United States. (Or that the Trump administration’s detentions of documented immigrants for publishing critiques of governmental policy really is a serious step in the direction of gulags, but that’s for a different story.) The government ownership of what is currently the only domestic rare-earths mine and the nation’s leading rare-earths company crosses a much bigger line than Mamdani’s groceries—as one MP Materials lobbyist **acknowledged** [link removed] to
**The Washington Post**:
Jeff Green, a lobbyist whose firm represents MP Materials and some of its competitors, said the new deal shows that the Trump administration has adopted the Chinese government’s tactics as far as subsidizing critical materials. Green says his firm has been advocating for such subsidies for years, but previous administrations largely viewed it as an issue that should be left to the free market.
Left to the free market, however, MP Materials was routinely underpriced by governmentally subsidized Chinese rare-earth mining companies, which left U.S. automakers, U.S phone companies, U.S. computer companies—really, any U.S. company or government agency that uses high-powered magnets in its products—dependent on a supply chain that began in China. The Obama and Biden administrations, however, were way too wedded to the market—or at least, feared getting the kind of criticism Mamdani is now getting—to suggest that they should actually become the controlling owner of a strategically important private company. For that matter, even during World War II, when the lion’s share of the federal budget was going to arms manufacturers, the Roosevelt administration didn’t take an equity share in any of them. By then, FDR had already been accused on countless occasions of secretly being a socialist, so the wartime Pentagon held not a single share in the multitude of companies for which it was the sole purchaser of their products.
[link removed]
No such constraints limit Donald Trump, however. He already had demonstrated that by having the government take a still ill-defined “golden share” in U.S. Steel once it was purchased by Japan’s Nippon Steel. National interest, so long as Trump controls the nation, takes precedence over the private control of investment and production. This bolsters the repeated admonitions of democratic socialist leader Michael Harrington that “Any idiot can nationalize; fascists can nationalize; communists can nationalize; capitalists can nationalize; the real issue is to have
**social**control over investment.”
Social control—workers’ control, consumers’ control—has never so much as occurred to Trump or even more traditional Republicans. But Pentagon ownership, in this instance, fits the pattern of Trump cementing the greatest possible control over anything he deems important. And in this instance, having a reliable supply chain of critically important rare earths is certainly in the national interest, just as having a reliable supply chain of the components for medications or any other necessity is in the national interest. The art of Trump’s deals has always been to give him either the maximum profit, the maximum publicity, or the maximum control, and with U.S. Steel and now MP Materials, he at least has satisfied his desire for the third of these. They’re in sync with his nationalism and his ego, and if they have some potential for serving the public good, well, that’s a nice by-product, too, if not his primary motivation.
On Tuesday, Apple, which relies on rare-earth magnets in all of its products, announced it had struck a **deal** [link removed] with MP materials to purchase its rare earths and go in on a joint venture with the company to build a rare-earths recycling plant and to work together to develop new and stronger magnets from the rare-earths material. Apple’s announcement made no mention of the government’s recently having become MP Materials’ majority shareholder, perhaps fearing the news that it was involved in a joint venture with Donald Trump’s Pentagon would give some of its workers pause and appear to critics that it was finding a new way to cozy up to Trump.
All of this makes Mamdani’s five city-owned groceries look positively pip-squeak by comparison. When it comes to state control of markets, Trump’s the guy—so long as Trump controls the state.
**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter [link removed]
[link removed]
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe [link removed]
**Click to Share This Newsletter**
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here [link removed].
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].
