Preview

President Trump’s declaration—at once, unsurprising (given Trump) and astonishing—that the government should get “a lot of money” from the sale of TikTok to Microsoft is rife with lessons for the whole family.

“A very substantial portion of that [sale] price,” Trump said yesterday, “is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States, because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen.”

At one level, then, Trump is simply seeking a reward for being the force behind this pending sale, having first demanded that TikTok, a Chinese company, get the hell out of the United States, and then changing his mind by telling Microsoft it would be okay if it bought the company’s U.S. operation. His position illustrates his “where’s-my-cut” mentality, and if he can’t personally be rewarded financially for his role in the deal (and surely, that must have been his first instinct), he can at least try to be personally rewarded politically: first, by advocating bringing some money into the Treasury before Election Day, and second, by avoiding offending the millions of young Americans who’d be upset if he simply drove TikTok from our shores like some pesky asylum seeker.

But by going where no president has gone before, Trump has hurled a brick through an Overton window. Without meaning to, he has raised the question of whether and under what conditions a socially consequential financial transaction should be so socially consequential that the public, through its government, should get a share. Beyond taxation, regulation, co-determination, and even expropriation, should the public have the right to claim a share of a specific transaction? I don’t recall Marx ever addressing this question, but Trump, completely inadvertently, has now submitted it to us leftists for consideration.

And he thought he was merely pursuing the art of the deal.