President Donald Trump has a new arrangement with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, the Financial Times reported over the weekend. The semiconductor companies agreed to send 15% of certain chip sales to China straight to the United States Treasury. That's the most recent — but by no means the only — example of how the Trump administration sees its role in this economy.

The president has been more involved in individual business affairs than is typical of the White House, such as demanding Intel's CEO to resign.

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal sat down with David Gura at Bloomberg to discuss just how far the federal government's economic reach can go. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: So I saw this news in the FT on Sunday, and my first reaction, literally, was, “Wait, what?” What about you?

David Gura: I felt similarly. I mean this, this is coming from a Republican president, and for so long, Republicans have espoused a belief in laissez faire economics that the government shouldn't be involved in the way that corporations operate. And this is definitely something different. The FT, as you mentioned, broke this story, called this a “quid pro quo” arrangement. I've seen it called highly unusual, unprecedented by another outlet.

But you have a president who today took to the podium in the White House and very transparently explained what happened here. Nvidia wanted to be able to sell its chips to the Chinese market, and the President said, “For you to be able to do that, to get the export license to do that, we've got to get something out of you. I'm going to prove it. If you give us 20% of those revenues — they negotiated down to 15%. I just can't stress enough how different this is, policywise, from what Republicans have have advocated for such a long period of time.

Ryssdal: Yes to all of that. There is that piece of it. There's also — and we should be clear here, presidents and governments have put the government in the economy repeatedly over the decades. Most recently, President Biden did it with his Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act and all of that, we did a whole series on it. The catch, of course, here is that that was relatively stable, relatively predictable. It went through the Congressional process. This is now unpredictable, ad hominem, if you will, government intervention. And that just complicates things immensely,

Gura: Absolutely. And you could also argue it's unconstitutional. We have a clause in the constitutional that says no tax or duty should be laid on articles exported from any state. So there's that as well. But what this comes down to is sort of what the rationale is for the government doling out these export licenses or not. And, you know, going back just a couple of months, the Trump administration said they weren't going to allow Nvidia and AMD to do this on national security grounds. If you have a president who's able to reverse this so quickly, in exchange for this exchange of revenue, I guess the question is: Are there actual national security grounds for not doing this?

And you're right to point out this could have a real snowball effect. I think there have to be CEOs, executives, at many other companies that do business overseas, just sort of wondering if the process that they've grown accustomed to — being vetted on national security grounds — is going to continue going forward here, if there's going to be something different at play. And if that something different at play here is going to be getting the U.S., getting the country, more involved in the business of the companies themselves.

Ryssdal: About those CEOs. Of course, Tim Cook (came) to the Oval Office last week, (he gave) a literal gold bar to the President of the United States. Intel got $8.5 billion worth of grants and loan guarantees for its chip building plants in this country. And then the other day, the President says the CEO of Intel ought to be fired and low, there he is today at the White House, negotiating to keep his job. It is unprecedented.

Gura: You can't use the word enough, and you're detailing kind of both ends of the spectrum here in terms of how executives are trying to navigate this new world. Either kind of contorting themselves to get into the President's good graces — and you heard the President praising Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia today, who's had a lot of meetings with him in recent weeks. And as you say, he's called for the resignation of Intel’s CEO based on investments that he's made in the past. We have a president here who really thinks that he should and can take an active role in the way companies operate.

And I can just go through a few moments in recent history here: He's floated the notion of this TikTok joint venture. He's called for a golden share in U.S. Steel if it's taken over by a Japanese company. You mentioned Intel just a moment ago, he's, of course, sued and reached settlements with many major corporations, including CBS, of course, that paved the way to the sale of its parent company. And he's encouraging domestic investments with with punitive tariffs, suggesting just a couple of days ago that there could be 100% tariff on chips made overseas. So he is really wielding this power with a sense of impunity. And going back to what I said a moment ago, executives are just trying to figure out how to roll with that. How to deal with a president who's doing this.