“He’s taking an extreme left-wing position which looks like state capitalism,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a longtime corporate governance scholar and the founding dean of Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute. “It is MAGA going Maoist. So it is taking away the discretion of individual managers—the control of the ownership of the business by its stakeholders, by its owners, the decision-making. And it is disrupting the wisdom of markets.”

Sonnenfeld—who says he has known Trump for decades, longer than any current cabinet member, and is preparing to release a book examining what he calls Trump’s “ten commandments”—argued the shift has nothing to do with ideology. 

“He’s come up with something new, which is the iron fist of an autocrat,” Sonnenfeld told Fortune. “That’s something which is not seen in capitalism too often.” 

In Sonnenfeld’s telling, the president’s recent moves substitute executive discretion for market outcomes, leaving managers and shareholders operating not within a free market, but at the pleasure of the White House.

Housing

A little after noon Wednesday, Trump announced on Truth Social he was banning “large institutional investors”—which include Wall Street conglomerates like private equity firms and real estate trusts— from buying single-family homes, and called on Congress to codify the law.

“People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump wrote.

Stocks of these institutional investors took a hit on the news. Blackstone, a notorious corporate home buyer, sank 6% Wednesday. Invitation Homes, known as the largest institutional home buyer, also dove 6%, while American Homes 4 Rent (AMH) saw trading briefly halted due to volatility after shares hit a three-year low.

Large institutional investors currently own only 2% of the housing stock, according to CNBC, but their ownership is heavily concentrated in cities in the Southeast like Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla. 

“I think [the ban] is a very tempting narrative that people on the left and the right have gravitated towards,” Skanda Amarnath,, cofounder of macroeconomic policy group Employ America, told Fortune. “I do not think it thinks through how much institutional investors are really buying, or what the effect actually is on affordability.”

Taking on the military industrial complex

Hours after the housing announcement, Trump turned his attention to the defense sector, arguably one of the most politically protected corners of American business.