Trump's pay-me capitalism puts the squeeze on corporate America

The big picture: In Trump's America, everything has a cost.

• Businesses wanted a pro-management, low-regulation, bigger-is-better administration. They, by and large, are getting that.
• The price? Adhering to Trump's priorities, paying whatever tariffs and cuts off the top he dictates, moving their operations where he wants them to, and toeing the line on his social priorities.
• Trump himself has leaned into this frame, repeatedly likening the U.S. to a department store, and describing himself as the store manager, setting the prices to do business there.

The list of examples grows by the day. Most recently, it was the administration seeking to convert CHIPS Act grants to Intel and other chipmakers into partial government ownership. But beyond that:

• 📋 Companies are being scored on their loyalty to Trump's platform.
• 💼 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says it's appropriate for corporate margins to come down (in other words, they should absorb more costs and pay more tariffs, even if that means making less money).
• ✂ The government is taking a cut of Nvidia's and AMD's foreign sales, with purposes yet to be determined.
• 💊 It's not just tech, either — for example, the demands to drugmakers to change the way they sell products, and to automakers to move their plants back to America.
• 🌎 The foreign investment components of the recent trade deals also contemplate the government owning major projects, hand-picked by Trump, and then leasing them to the private sector.

Between the lines: These moves are creating a lack of certainty for businesses — not only about the rules, but how legally sound they are and how long they'll last.

• "To the extent that we now have relationships with the private sector and the government occurring beyond those legislatively prescribed rules of the road, it creates a lot of uncertainty what future administrations might do and what their guardrails are going forward," Neil Bradley, chief policy officer and head of strategic advocacy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tells Axios.
• "Business leaders are trying to understand how this works both in the very near term, but also over the long term, thinking about how commitments made today may play out in future administrations from both parties."

Zoom out: Any company that doesn't want to play ball can look at Apple for an example of the consequences.

• The company pledged $500 billion in U.S. manufacturing. Not good enough, once it became clear the iPhone maker was also working on expanding manufacturing in India to keep costs down.

• Pretty soon Trump was threatening huge tariffs on phones, none of which went away until Apple CEO Tim Cook went to the White House with another $100 billion pledge and a 24k gold present.

What they're saying: Wall Street is, to put it mildly, skeptical of the administration's approach.

• "I've been around this business for a long time, and I've never seen the government make a savvy investment when they get involved in the private sector," Laffer Tengler Investments CEO Nancy Tengler said in a note this week.
• "I don't care how good a businessman you are, give it to the private sector and let people like me be the critic and let the government get to the business of government."

For the record: The White House defended Trump's track record and said it was what voters wanted him to do.

• "President Trump's hands-on leadership has already delivered trillions in investment commitments in key sectors, billions in tariff revenue, a swift end to Joe Biden's inflation crisis and unprecedented trade deals that finally level the playing field for Americans," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
• "The administration's pro-growth policy mix of tax cuts, deregulation and tariffs ushered in historic job, wage, and economic growth in President Trump's first term, and they're set to do so again in President Trump's second term."

The bottom line: The "cost of doing business" is going up, and so are the risks of not paying.