The handwringing over Trump continues and is completely unwarranted. Obama bailed out the entire banking industry to horrifying moral hazard. The US is bailing out Intel for national security reasons and taking a 10% stake is a better deal for US taxpayers than how typical bailouts like GM played out. Sheesh! It's like you can't even read a news story these days without seeing the anti-Trump bias programmed into the article.

It was Bush who signed the bailout bill, not Obama.

I'm genuinely curious why you need to just randomly run out here and defend trump, one of the more indefensible humans of the past century?

Aside from the fact that Bush signed the banking bailout bill, not Obama, it is absolutely possible and reasonable to believe that -- on the differing merits of each case -- bailing out the banks was a good (even if fraught) idea, but that bailing out Intel is foolish.

I'm not in either camp at the moment, as I don't have a deep understanding of Intel or its finances, but I'm tired of people whining about how others could possibly have a different opinion about two similar but different events, separated by nearly two decades, as if this is some sort of "gotcha!" moment. It's not. Move on.

But even if -- let's just say if -- this Intel bailout were identical to the bank bailouts in every way... priors matter! Even someone who agreed with Bush back in 2008 that the bailouts were necessary, someone who was largely in agreement with much of what Bush did during his presidential terms... that person could very much disagree with what Trump has done in the past 7 months (as well as what he did 2017-2021), and that disagreement makes it entirely reasonable to question whether or not this particular move is a good decision. That's just... entirely normal.

So, the one bad thing that sticks out about what Trump is doing now, is that he's adding more conditions to the money that has already been legally disbursed by Congress. Under the CHIPS act, Intel is already eligible to receive the money; Trump is illegally adding more conditions for Intel to receive the money, after the fact. To do this legally, the act needs to be amended. As simple as that. Anything more than that is illegal.

Completely unwarranted? lol