Anyone here arguing that we should just let Intel fail in the market needs to understand that Intel is struggling right now partly because Asian nations like South Korea and Taiwan have for years subsidized their own chip making companies because they knew that in the long term, it was going to be an important strategic industry that would eventually be worth the effort and trouble. Now look where we are. Their long term strategy has paid off. Only TSMC is at the cutting edge, and Samsung is a fairly distant, but still reasonably close, secondary player.

Maybe there are better ways to prop up Intel besides the government taking a stake, but losing Intel would be a huge blow to American manufacturing interests. There's been a failure of strategic vision, both at Intel and in the American government. I think as a short term measure, taking a stake isn't the worst thing the government could do at this time.

Also to go off on a tangent a bit: this is one of the benefits of having a Trump-like character as President; he's clearly not beholden to any ideology and is extremely flexible when it comes to making policy decisions, even when a certain policy might be more at home with the opposing party or side of politics.