President Donald Trump is trying to force down drug prices to specific levels. He has directed tariff rates on virtually every country. He declared that the Federal Reserve “must” lower interest rates. He takes a personal interest in the fate of individual companies like TikTok. He appears frequently with CEOs to tout investment deals.

And in his Middle East trip, Trump pitched business leaders on doing business in America for one big reason: his personal involvement in the U.S. economy. “There’s no better place to make a future or make a fortune — to do anything, frankly — than what we have in the United States of America under a certain president, Donald J. Trump,” he said. “I have the right attitude.”

In the opening months of his second term, Trump has taken an unusually direct and high-profile role in attempting to manage the sprawling American economy — an approach that could bring him enormous benefits if it thrives or danger if it stumbles. It’s a departure from decades of Republican orthodoxy and arguably from Trump’s own history; during the 2024 campaign, he called Democrat Kamala Harris a communist and a Marxist because her vow to tackle price gouging could have led to price controls.

“In this administration, policy decisions seem to be made only based on the president’s personal views, not after systemic analysis,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a top economic official under President Bill Clinton.

“The president of our country is not the CEO of our businesses,” Elmendorf said. “I think this president likes the idea of being the CEO of businesses, but that’s not the role of the president. They should be setting broad polices, not intervening for particular companies.”

The White House said Trump’s personal intervention is preferable to letting lower-level officials run the show.

“After four years of the Joe Biden disaster, over 77 million Americans rejected having anonymous bureaucrats who call themselves ‘the experts’ run our country,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said. “They instead voted for one man with one vision who isn’t beholden to special interests: President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s attempted interventions frequently include threats, whether against companies or countries. On Saturday, Trump upbraided Walmart for warning that prices were likely to rise due to Trump’s tariff policies.

“Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING,” he wrote on his Truth Social account. “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!”

Few Republicans have challenged Trump on his highly personal style, despite its clear departure from traditional free-market economics. Nor have they taken issue with the overlaps between his personal interests and the nation’s.

Trump’s trip to the Middle East took him to a region where his family has numerous ventures. Shortly before he signed an economic deal with Qatar, the country offered him a $400 million plane to use during his presidency and possibly beyond. His administration has taken a friendly approach to cryptocurrency as his family becomes more involved in that medium.

For Trump’s supporters, his personal engagement is a major asset for the United States. As a successful businessman, they say, he is taking direct responsibility for turbocharging the economy.

“He is an intensely personal person. He is not a corporate CEO type who delegates to large groups,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia). “He is a hard-driving entrepreneur who has amassed a billion-plus by forcing decisions and driving success.”

Trump’s view of his role was reflected in his recent comparison of the U.S. economy to a department store. “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there,” he told Time magazine last month. “And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”

Conservative economists tend to frown on decision-making that is too centralized, let alone spearheaded by a single individual. Republicans have long railed against “picking winners and losers.”

Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, said Trump is aggressively seizing powers that Congress has ceded to the White House over the years — notably the authority to declare an economic emergency, which has paved the way for Trump to unilaterally impose tariffs.

“This is not at all what the founders thought would happen, that he can say some magic words like declaring a national emergency and he can do whatever you want,” Nowrasteh said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) took to the Senate floor last month to attack Trump’s emergency declaration that allowed him to impose tariffs on Canada, saying it was a form of one-man taxation.

“Our Constitution doesn’t allow any one man or woman to raise taxes — it must be the body of Congress,” Paul said. “And yet here we are today before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. This is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The Constitution forbids it.”

But most Republicans have been silent or supportive of Trump’s moves — a stance that carries political risks for the president and his party. Trump regularly predicts a golden future at a time when many economists say his tariffs will likely spur significant inflation and as consumer confidence sinks.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll in late April found that more than 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, an issue where he previously had strong support. Nearly 2 out of 3 Americans disapproved of his handling of tariffs, his flagship economic policy.

At that time, Trump had imposed a startling tariff of 145 percent on Chinese goods. On Monday, after an angry standoff, the U.S. and China struck a deal temporarily cutting that to 30 percent, while China reduced its own tariffs on the U.S.

The abrupt reversal, Elmendorf said, shows that Trump is making decisions without expert input and, as a result, has been unprepared for the consequences.

“No one person, however talented or knowledgeable, can understand everything about the world that a collection of experts working for that person can understand,” Elmendorf said. “Any individual has blind spots and won’t see some indirect consequences of a policy or won’t know enough about how another party will respond.”

Trump is not the first president to take a direct hand in economic decisions, although that has generally happened when the country faced dire conditions.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, scrambling to overcome the Great Depression, personally dictated the government’s daily price for gold, reportedly raising it by 21 cents on one occasion because that was a lucky number. Richard M. Nixon, worried that inflation would dampen his reelection prospects, imposed wage and price controls in 1971.

But since then, Republicans have warned forcefully against too much intervention in the economy by the president and Washington in general.

In 2012, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), the Republicans’ longtime economic guru, derided “the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.” The following year, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) criticized President Barack Obama’s climate proposal by saying, “Our argument with the president right now is that he is picking winners and losers.”

Trump himself has attacked Democrats for wanting to micromanage the economy, referring to Democratic nominee Harris during the 2024 campaign as “Comrade Kamala.”

“She is a communist, I guess,” he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” adding, “This country is not ready for a Marxist or a communist.”

When a fact-checking organization pressed the Trump campaign on what he meant, a spokeswoman pointed to Harris’s support for banning price-gouging by food companies. “Kamala Harris has literally suggested price controls as a matter of economic policy,” the spokeswoman said. “[I] would encourage you to inspect the well-documented list of Marxist and communists who’ve suggested the same.”

On Monday, Trump signed an executive order to impose “most-favored-nation” pricing on pharmaceuticals, meaning Americans would pay the same for drugs as people in other industrialized countries. If companies do not begin charging similar prices, the administration would adopt a rule to “impose” them.

That is different from “price controls,” the White House argues, though some experts differ. “Basically, what we’re doing is equalizing. There’s a new word that I came up with, which I think is probably the best word,” Trump said. He added, “We never had a president that had the courage to do this. And nobody knew the system like I do.”

PhRMA, the drug industry’s trade association, responded to Trump’s move by declaring that “government price setting in any form is bad for American patients and undermines the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry’s ability to compete against other countries.”

All presidents try to shape or influence the economy, including by attracting investment and fighting what they consider unfair trade practices. President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion for the semiconductor manufacturers, for example, in hopes of regaining the U.S. edge in a crucial industry.

But no president in recent memory has put the sort of personal stamp on his efforts that Trump has. The CHIPS Act passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan votes, requiring numerous compromises and input from an array of lawmakers and private companies.

Trump often seems to be working on his own, like a CEO or a mayor trying to attract business to his city. In recent days, he personally urged Apple CEO Tim Cook to abandon his plans for expanding production in India.

“I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” Trump said Thursday. “I said to him: ‘Tim, you’re my friend. I’ve treated you very good. You’re coming here with $500 billion [in U.S. investment], but now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.’”

Before becoming president, Trump ran his family’s real estate empire, so unlike other politicians, he had little experience making decisions collaboratively with lawmakers or government agencies. Trump’s goals are different as well; he appears far more concerned with winning what he considers economic victories for the U.S. than building a stable system of global commerce.

“It’s just a major problem with the American system that one man has so much power,” Nowrasteh said. “It’s been persistent for a long time, but it is far more outrageous now than it’s been in the past.”