V-Dem data shows US fell from 2nd to 16th in state-ownership ranking

Trump took $10bn in equity stakes by November 2025, Guardian column reports

A Guardian opinion column cites V-Dem project data showing the United States fell from 2nd to 16th in a state-ownership-of-the-economy ranking during 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. The V-Dem project, based in Sweden, measures the erosion of democracy worldwide and built its scale to track the share of economic activity under direct state control. Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics drew attention to the data, according to the column.

From 2002 to 2024, the United States ranked among the four countries with the least state control of the economy, according to V-Dem. The shift to 16th occurred in 2025, the first year of Trump’s return to office.

By November 2025, the Trump administration had spent more than $10 billion acquiring equity stakes in companies it deemed essential for national security, according to columnist Eduardo Porter. The companies include Intel, ventures mining for critical minerals, and an option to take a stake in Westinghouse, the nuclear-reactor manufacturer. The administration also “blackmailed Nippon Steel into granting Trump’s Washington a ‘golden share’ in exchange for the go-ahead to purchase US Steel,” Porter wrote.

The decline nonetheless leaves the United States well short of the command-economy model associated with the Soviet Union. By V-Dem’s accounting, Washington’s stake in the economy remains smaller than in 163 countries. The Norwegian government holds a majority stake in its national oil company, placing Norway 18th in the ranking. Private companies contribute 60 percent of China’s gross domestic product, the column noted.

Porter acknowledged that “in a geopolitical landscape shaped by competition with China, there is a reasonable case to be made for Washington to take equity stakes in industries that are critical for American leadership and security, and which might not develop autonomously in competition with rivals heavily subsidized by Beijing.” Yet, he wrote, “Trump’s wanton lunge for private assets lacks the discipline required for this kind of strategic positioning.”

The US Supreme Court has acted against some of Trump’s trade-policy assertions. The court “already slapped down his attempt to take over trade policy from Congress,” Porter reported. Trump has nonetheless continued to threaten trading partners, posting that he would “STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.” He has also proposed direct cash payments, promising to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans maintain control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. His anti-communist television advertisements, in which he pledged to “defeat communism,” were paid for with taxpayer dollars, according to the column.

Porter argued that Trump “clearly has no interest in the dictatorship of the proletariat, caring little if at all for the fate of the downtrodden. His preferred flavor of redistribution takes from those on the bottom to give to those on the top.”

Seeking to place Trump’s ambitions in a comparative frame, Porter wrote that “watching the US president bow to Xi Jinping last week, it’s tempting to think that Trump wants to emulate China’s leader.” Xi, Porter noted, “gets to rule unimpeded over more than one billion Chinese. He gets to shape China’s society and economy at will – purging this rival, raising that sycophant to power.” But Porter concluded that “Xi’s China is too disciplined for Trump,” because the Chinese leader “relies on hordes of technocrats to execute a coherent strategy aimed to achieve technological superiority.”

Porter instead pointed to Vladimir Putin, “who rules Russia like a fiefdom,” and to cold-war-era Latin American strongmen such as Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier or Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, “who saw government as a tool to enrich their families and cement dynasties in power.” If nothing else, Porter wrote, Trump’s “dealings with crypto suggest he views his administration as a road to family riches.”

Drawing on Karl Marx’s “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” about the 1851 French coup that brought Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to power, Porter quoted Marx’s claim that the work was meant “to demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” Americans, Porter wrote, “may be grateful that their most recent class struggles didn’t produce a homegrown Lenin. But they did deliver Donald Trump.”

Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute noted that Trump “clearly wants to be king” but that the US’s political economy may not let him. Hendrix compared the situation to Vladimir Putin’s, noting that the Russian leader “managed to establish autocratic rule over a fairly primitive, oil-based economy.” The kind of autocratic control Trump appears to seek, Hendrix noted, “is much harder to achieve in a modern complex economy.” “You can’t simply seize the oil to run the place,” Hendrix observed, according to the column.

Porter framed Trump’s “statist leanings” as marking “a dramatic break with the market-focused presidencies of his recent predecessors, Democrat and Republican,” and as reflecting “a body of thought that is skeptical, if not outright hostile, towards essential building blocks of the global market economy.” Trump, Porter wrote, “has pushed back against globalization since his first term in office, seemingly drawn to the Marxist-inspired dependency theory, which washed across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s proposing protectionism and state industrial policy as a path to economic development.”

Porter closed the column by questioning why Republicans alarmed by New York City democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for city-run bodegas should not also oppose Trump’s pattern of acquiring stakes in private companies. “If anything,” Porter wrote, “Trump reminds us that socialism is not the only ideological justification for state projects to take control over resources and wealth.” He added: “Though Trump may fail, Americans’ acquiescence as he grabs for power raises a question for those who freak out over Mamdani’s city-run bodegas: why is Trump’s lurch to take over the American economy any better than what they hear from the Democratic Socialists of America?”

The Guardian piece is published as a column under the publication’s “US economy” section and labeled as analysis, carrying the byline of Eduardo Porter, a journalist focused on economics and politics who writes the newsletter “Being There” on Substack. The column format carries the author’s interpretive frame rather than the Guardian’s neutral voice, with the V-Dem data serving as the empirical anchor of the argument.