As is often the case when Trump tweets something detached from reality, it is difficult to tell how serious he is. His defenders often try to write off his most bizarre remarks as jokes, though there’s no sign this one is meant to be humorous: It’s in the middle of an extended rant, and it fits with his other statements about China and trade.

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Even if Trump is serious, does he really think he can mandate the behavior of private business via Twitter missive? Who knows! Trump has shown enough autocratic impulse, and enough ignorance of how the government and law work, that it’s impossible to rule that out. It’s also possible, though, that Trump knows he can’t actually decree such a move, but understands the power of saying it anyway, both as public relations and as a way to pressure companies to act out of fear of presidential reprisal.

Trump has demonstrated a yearning for the tools of a command economy since his campaign, when he repeatedly promised to keep American jobs in the country. In November 2016, when he was still president-elect, he bullied Carrier, the air-conditioner company, to cancel the closing of a plant in Indiana. The move horrified small-government conservatives, many of whom had opposed Trump during the election, but he was just getting started. As his trade war has hurt American agriculture, the president has undertaken a $16 billion subsidy program for farmers. This week, he also publicly lambasted car companies for reaching an agreement with the state of California to set emissions standards stricter than his administration’s.

Trump has done all of this even while attempting to paint his 2020 Democratic opponents as a bunch of socialists. Calling the president’s actions “socialist” is a bit misleading, because they don’t really seem to be aimed at creating a more equitable redistribution of wealth. The Carrier rescue turned out to be a sham. The farm bailouts seem to be largely flowing to farmers who are already wealthy. But they extend government control of the economy in ways that the Republican Party has traditionally fiercely opposed. GOP officials attacked President Barack Obama as a socialist for his bailouts of the automotive industry and for the Affordable Care Act, but Obama didn’t go around issuing peremptory, unilateral commands to all American businesses.

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Perhaps the decree is just a fleeting notion for Trump, but in the past the administration has sometimes gone to great lengths to turn seemingly outlandish declarations into established policy. Trump promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States during the 2016 election, and the White House worked through multiple iterations of a policy to bar some Muslims before finding one that passed legal muster. More recently, the administration has tried multiple ways to legally justify family separations and the internment of immigrant children at the border.