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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs. The fact that it was done in a tweet-esque post is even more concerning. I'd expect that something like this would have been accompanied by a proper investigation and writeup stating the administration's perspective on why, but instead it's just "he's highly CONFLICTED".

I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.

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The king, I mean unitary executive, has opinions and power to do all things without regard to law, without critical thinking or consideration if they are beneficial or harmful to humanity, and without boundaries.

This is why Tim Apple presented Dear Leader with a 24K gold award and so was rewarded by a tariff exclusion.

They may have dropped the name China Initiative but all this tough talk on China (and immigration) primes the public to believe the worst.

https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...

This administration (and the previous one) have been paying billions of dollars to chip companies to make fabs in the United States.

Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.

Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.

"Strategic" companies like Boeing and Intel get socialism for corporations and rich people, but then decry "socialism" and "communism" for everything and everyone who isn't rich.

Must have been great to be buddies with Trump and get the heads up so you could short Intel right before his tweet.

Like this?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033113

Stupid flamebait.

Not a sitting president and the NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.

> [T]he NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.

That is correct. IIRC, FISA made that the law of the land since like the 1970s. However, Congress felt the need to provide retroactive immunity to the telcos who assisted in the FISA-violating wiretaps that the NSA demanded of them around the turn of the century. See Title II on printed page 32 of this [0] for more information, and check out newspaper coverage about the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" around July, 2008.

This grant of retroactive immunity was particularly outrageous because it mooted in-progress civil suits against those telcos, which is not something that's supposed to be done at scale... especially for civil liberties violations.

That's a really odd thing to do if no law was violated, don't you think?

[0] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207052813/http://frwebgate....>, found via following the chain of [1] -> [2] (because THOMAS is down today) -> [3]

[1] the July 9th, 2008 entry here: <https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline>

[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101209001911/http://thomas.loc...>

[3] The PDF here of version 4 of the bill, because archive.org doesn't have the text version archived. <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207012221/http://thomas.loc...>

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...

Don't forget the context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis

Like what?

Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.

I don’t recall a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.

Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.

President Obama:

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...

Sen. Warren:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/embroiled-scandal-wells...

These are news reports after the fact. It's not normal for a president to go on twitter and publicly deride someone into resigning.

The norm that’s been transgressed here is getting more and more specific, isn’t it?

> a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.

That was my original "norm" I stated. What has gotten more specific about that?

Publicly or privately, why is one fine and the other not?

The other hopefully happens after the President and his advisors talk behind the scenes. This isn’t a Republican vs Democrat thing. Republican presidents never did this before.

And that happened as part of the government bailing GM out.

I'll answer this in earnest, assuming you're asking in good faith.

The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.

Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.

It's genuinely an enormous difference.

I am asking in good faith and I understand why there would be a preference towards private versus public. It sounds like Trump does not care to attempt a private conversation as he wants Tan out. The Cadence settlement is likely the only public info we have about Tan's conflicts, the government has more info and they aren't going to spend time working through private channels, though it sounds like Tan is trying that now.

I’m struggling to believe you are asking in good faith. He answered your question and your immediate response is to try and defend what the president did in terms of violating norms.

It seems like youve had an agenda since before you asked the question

I was asking in good faith, so not sure what to tell you. My agenda was to understand why public versus privately calling for a CEO's removal is better than the other since they have the same goal, but I can understand why someone would prefer one over the other.

I mean I answered that above. Not sure what else you want.

That reply was to lovich.

Did you ask a question? I’m not seeing one.

If the government has more info that’s even more reason to make this a matter of governance, and not twitter, IMO.

Genuine question, what do you think was the purpose of trump making that a public grievance instead of working on it directly with Tan?

I think Trump wants Tan out. Publicly calling him out puts pressure on him more than a private behind the scenes process that will take weeks/months versus a few days. Tan might be able to supplicate Trump by presenting a golden egg, though.

The public pressure puts Tan on defense which gives Trump leverage in negotiating with him. Not sure what Tan/Intel will need to give up to address any potential conflicts but remains to be seen what happens.

Right so publicly bully him into defense mode and either force him to resign or publicly bend the knee to trump.

If you genuinely don't see the problem here, I don't know what to say.

When President Obama privately asked Rick Wagoner to resign from GM, do you think that spared him from embarrassment or feeling bullied? There was absolutely no need for Rick Wagoner to have to resign, but the Obama administration needed a blood sacrifice to sell a bailout. A 30 year career at GM ended in disgrace because the government couldn’t trust him to turn around GM, even though he was a popular CEO.

But you’re right, the Obama administration didn’t publicly bully him, just privately did so. I don’t see one method as better than the other, there’s a use for either but they both have the same goals.

Fortunate for Tan, a lot of people don’t like Trump and he’ll probably gain more public support and potentially stay on as CEO. This is certainly where this backfires on Trump as his method of publicly shooting from the hip doesn’t always work. Tan becomes the target of the day, forgotten about a week later. This is where Trump diplomacy could work better through private methods, but we also don’t know if that’s been tried. Quite honestly, I think he just had somebody whispering in his ear and he just decided to tweet it.

The CEO will likely be fine, Trump also announces movements of nuclear submarines on Truth Social.

I'd be more concerned about non-public dealings that Trump might have learned from Roy Cohn, but these are probably off limits for discussion here. In general, what is on Truth Social does not matter.

The GM CEO had presided over a time when GM got into such bad shape they needed a government bailout, and had to come back asking for even more government money.

The Wells Fargo CEO presided over a major scandal involving customers being signed up for services they never agreed to.

What has the Intel CEO presided over during his short tenure that measures up to those?

Vastly increased attention on semiconductor companies as national security assets coupled with fairly extensive business relationships with companies controlled by America's chief geopolitical rival.

Oh, so not the same kind of thing at all then...

You'll notice that none of the examples on this thread are the same things.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of hot air to prop up a false equivalency.

I suggest not asking questions you don't want the answers to.

I suggest not normalizing Trump's behaviors by creating false equivalencies.

I'm interested in what's actually happening, not how it feeds the narrative about Trump. We saw the same thing yesterday with a dozen people on HN het up about how the Library of Congress Annotated Constitution had removed Habeas from its online copy of the Constitution (along with the Navy, letters of marque and reprisal, and the No Favored Ports clause) and people said the same thing there: stop claiming this was just a website fuckup and normalizing Trump!

Yes, what actually happened is important.

In that Constitution story, a government website that has the Constitution's text was updated in a peculiar way. It could be interpreted as having been related to habeas corpus rights, as that was in the middle of the removal. It could also be interpreted as unintentional, as the deletion started in the middle of Article I Section 8. You'd think a targeted deletion wouldn't include so much unrelated text. Then again, you could say that it's just an incompetently done targeted deletion. It's debatable! Maybe it was intentional and maybe the order came from the top. Or maybe it was just a run of the mill tech SNAFU.

In this situation, Trump, on Trump's social media platform, posted that he wants this CEO to resign. That's not debatable, it's verifiable fact. It happened. We know the man at the top is saying this.

So yeah, stop with the false equivalencies and pay attention to what's actually happening.

Just so we're clear that you apparently still think it's possible that an order came down from the top to delete Congress's authorization to form a Navy from the Library of Congress's online annotated Constitution, which isn't even in the first SERP for me on Google for "online constitution", but I guess you've gotta start somewhere.

Dude, he altered a weather map with a Sharpie on live TV.

The theory behind this Constitution thing is as if, after altering the weather map, the weather changed.

Well, it would have if he had been allowed to use nuclear weapons on the hurricane instead of just a Sharpie.

I remember this blog post coming across HN when it was posted: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/07/07/support/

It's a good story, but what I'm remembering and is relevant here is this:

> At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there.

Authoritarians and fascists recognize this potential to create new "truths". If you say it enough, it's the truth. If you change things and say it's always been that way, then it was. If you're willing to drag through the mud, fire, prosecute, imprison, harm, or kill those who push back, fewer people push back. Even if everyone "knows" it's false, it no longer matters - most operate as if it is true.

Let's not forget that years later, Trump felt the need to inflict revenge on NOAA employees connected to sharpiegate: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/two-high-rankin...

That's why this shit makes people nervous, why people are on edge about information changing on government websites for no apparent reason. Trump has repeatedly shown a willingness to inflict his view of reality on others, with force, and without regard for facts.

You trivialize it at your own peril.

I am trivializing the LOC Constitution page thing and nothing you can say is going to make me stop, because the conspiracy theory behind it doesn't make any sense. By continuing to defend it, you're making my point for me about this Intel story (where malfeasance would make sense!).

But we're going around in circles and should probably just let this go.

Actually your original point was:

>Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.

Which was you saying "this Intel thing is NBD and basically the same as a bunch of past things presidents have done."

That's the original false equivalency I called you out on. And which you now disagree with apparently, because now you think the Intel thing is potential malfeasance? I don't think you really know what your position is anymore.

I have no idea if it's no big deal or not, only that it's not unprecedented and of all the companies you'd expect to see something like this happen at in a normal administration, this is the one.

Again, what is the precedent for the president of the united states to publicly call on a CEO to resign, in the absence of a major scandal or company failure that has required the government to intervene to save the public / investors / etc?

You keep saying it's the same old shit but when people point out the differences you change the subject. You're basically a troll.

In this thread: a household name in the infosec field tells us to chill out and let our guard down, despite a pattern of abuse and contempt for democratic norms not seen in developed Western countries since the 1930s.

Super normal response to a temporary website glitch at the 9th most popular online copy of the US Constitution.

I described the situation you referenced to show why it is not the same as this situation. I did not declare ownership of a position.

Personally I'd say it's 99.99% in favor of run of the mill SNAFU. The 0.01% is mostly an allowance for the tendency of authoritarian systems to occasionally act in incredibly clumsy and incompetent ways. I feel this may be a factor of personal loyalty and ideological alignment receiving more consideration than competence in hiring and advancement decisions within authoritarian systems.

People are interested in valid answers, not gaslighting.

I'd hardly call the GM situation comparable. In that case GM was asking the government for $16.6 billion (on top of $9.4 billion they had received under Bush).

Asking a company that wants a nearly $17 billion bailout to make some changes is not at all unreasonable or unusual.

As far as I know Intel is not asking the government for anything special, so having the government commenting on their internal organization is unusual.

Presumably all the teeth in the USG demands are about USG contracts.

Lockheed's CEO Carl Kotchian resigned after political pressure but he brought it on himself.

Look up the Teddy Roosevelt era. Before his election and after he leaves.

It's not done by competent presidents. Trump is incompetent. Feds mind their own business except for doj, fbi, sec, fina who have evidence of wrong doing.

Meh, Trump wants someone as loyal and willing to spy on us as he thinks this guy was for China. I love how the right detests regulation but is okay with arbitrarily monkeying directly in the management of a company like this with no rules around it. No company is safe under this guy.

Correction: The right detests regulation on the things they like at that given moment.

If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.

The MAGA right has demonstrated they have no principles other than whatever Trump wants at that given moment. We'll see whether the Epstein files is truly an exception to that.

47% of Republicans would still vote for Trump even if he were implicated in Epstein's crimes:

https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/U.S-Politics...

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It can be very difficult for some people to separate their personal feelings about Trump from whether he’s on the right side of an issue.

It's nearly impossible for people to reason objectively about any political issue given the type of rhetoric that's fed to them 24/7.

Here's a fun experiment. Take someone you know who's super passionate about a political figure, doesn't matter which one.

Then tell them "everything you think you know about this person has been told to you by someone else".

> It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs

This truly never happened before. Oh wait:

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...

Not an apt comparison. GM needed $50 billion in government funds just to stay alive.

All of tech is propped up by the government.

GenX and Millennials watched too many "Sprite; you do you" commercials and grew up believing in their autonomy and freedom.

But American government was always at the wheel, via regulation, law, and drinks in DC off the clock.

It's all PR to say our system free market and the like. Intel wouldn't exist without falling in line over the decades.

In what ways was the PC revolution propped up by the government?

Lose the argument, change the conversation? An old tactic, but a stupid one.

So we're moving from "it never happened, it's crazy!" to "of course it's happened before, but it's different this time, so I just falsely pretended the time before didn't happen"? Of course each case is different. But Presidents interfered in economy of private enterprise for a while - including criticizing CEOs, firing CEOs, and many other intrusive acts - especially after (and including) FDR, and pretending nobody before Trump ever did it is either ignorant or disingenuous. If you don't like what Trump is doing, great, explain why, but don't falsely claim things like that didn't happen before. They did.

I didn't move shit, I stated a fact and you went apoplectic over it.

Wasn’t that in conjunction with the us govt essentially taking over gm though?

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