Corporate America doesn’t want to fight with President Trump in public. But as a result, it’s ceding him an unprecedented amount of control over the shape — and future — of U.S. business.

In the past week, the president has turned up the heat on big companies and their CEOs to an extent that is unprecedented even by Trump’s norms-shattering standards. He has publicly attacked companies and their executives throughout his political career — but now he’s demanding firings of executives who aren’t even household names, such as a corporate economist at Goldman Sachs.

On Monday, Trump announced an extraordinary deal for the U.S. government to take a 15% share of Nvidia’s H20 chip sales in China as a condition for easing restrictions to allow the chip to be sold there. Then his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, on Wednesday said the administration may ask other companies for similar payments in the future.

“Trump has always used the bully pulpit of the presidency to try and direct business activity towards his desired ends — but in the second term, we’ve seen this taken to a whole new level,” said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The Nvidia revenue-sharing arrangement, in particular, sounded alarms among the U.S. business community — which tends to skew fiscally conservative and anti-regulation, and which in general welcomed Trump’s reelection last year. By demanding a cut of a private company’s sales, in exchange for the right to do business, Trump is defying the traditionally Republican gospel of free-market capitalism.

On Monday, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal warned that Trump is “imitating [the] Chinese Communist Party” and transforming the U.S. economy into something resembling China’s government-controlled “state capitalism.”

It’s a mounting worry shared by other business experts. “It is a huge concern,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who regularly speaks with CEOs.

“This ‘Marxist MAGA’ movement keeps expanding more and more, taking control without the resistance of private-sector decision-making,” he added. “So that means we have winners and losers based on cronyism.”

In an emailed response to NPR, White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not address the concerns about cronyism or “state capitalism.”

“President Trump’s hands-on leadership is paving the way towards a new Golden Age for America,” Desai wrote.

Trump amps up his attacks on CEOs and other executives

Trump has long used social media and his other public statements to cajole, criticize and praise companies and individual CEOs. They, in turn, have actively sought his approval — especially since he won reelection in November.

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images / Getty Images President Trump listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at a White House event in April. This week, Trump said that Nvidia would give the U.S. government a cut of its sales in China as a condition for being allowed to sell its H20 chips there.

During his first term, many in corporate America openly criticized Trump over policies including his ban on immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries, or they sought to distance themselves from his most controversial statements, like his response after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. But now most businesses are trying to avoid getting drawn into anything seen as “political” — aside from actively courting the president’s approval.

In January, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos were just some of the business leaders attending Trump’s second inauguration. And until the two men fell out this spring, Trump granted Tesla CEO Elon Musk an extraordinary amount of power to dismantle the federal workforce.

Corporate America’s uneasy silence has continued despite Trump’s aggressive efforts to reshape the U.S. economy through his wide-ranging import taxes, and to bring the Federal Reserve more closely under his control.

Many of these policies have worried Wall Street investors, big-company CEOs and the small-business owners who are on the front lines of the tariffs fallout. But even as they try to lobby Trump behind closed doors, many business leaders are refraining from criticizing him or his policies in public.

“Because of the power of this vindictiveness, CEOs are reluctant to poke the bear,” Sonnenfeld said.

Trump has warned major automakers not to raise prices and has publicly demanded that Walmart “eat” the cost of his tariffs. He also took credit for Coca-Cola’s recent announcement that it would roll out sodas made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

But last week, he went a step further by demanding the resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. In a social media post that sent the company’s shares plunging, Trump alleged that Tan was “highly CONFLICTED” and had problematic ties to China.

From an economic perspective, Trump’s demand for Tan’s resignation was one of the “most aggressive public statements the president has made,” said Meena Bose, a presidential policy expert and director of a Hofstra University center that studies the American presidency.

“So much of President Trump’s second term is really charting an independent path, with very little attention to precedent — or in some ways, almost a rejection of precedent,” she added.

Tan was able to change Trump’s tune by appealing to him in person. After the Intel CEO visited the White House on Monday, Trump declared that Tan’s “success and rise is an amazing story.”

Intel’s shares jumped. The company said in a news release that Tan used the meeting to discuss “Intel’s commitment to strengthening U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership. We appreciate the President’s strong leadership to advance these critical priorities.” A spokesperson declined to comment further.

But soon Trump had picked another corporate target. On Tuesday, he criticized Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and told him to “get himself a new Economist.” Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius has repeatedly warned that Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs will ultimately increase the prices that U.S. consumers pay and could damage the wider economy.

A Goldman Sachs spokesperson declined to comment. And its investors were less spooked than Intel’s; the bank’s shares have risen since Trump’s post.

Calling for CEOs to take “collective action”

Corporate America is hardly alone in feeling increased heat from the White House. Since taking office in January, Trump has won all kinds of concessions from law firms, universities and media companies seeking U.S. approval for mergers or other business dealings.

Chip Somodevilla/POOL / AFP via Getty Images / AFP via Getty Images Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were among the guests at President Trump’s second inauguration, in January. During Trump’s first term, some of these same executives more openly criticized the president over some of his policies, including over immigration.

Meanwhile, the president is also seeking to undermine the independence of other powerful U.S. entities, including the Federal Reserve. His ongoing campaign against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over lowering interest rates preceded his decision this month to fire the head of the government’s top statistics agency after it put out a disappointing jobs report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is responsible for producing the monthly jobs report and for tracking inflation.

That firing set off bipartisan alarm bells about how Trump’s politically motivated actions are destabilizing the broader financial and economic system.

“Having objective, nonpartisan data, just boring data that is put together with high quality and integrity — that is needed for our economic and political debates. And to threaten that just makes us poor as a country,” Michael Horrigan, who formerly oversaw the bureau’s employment measurement programs and is now president of the nonprofit W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told NPR this month.

And yet, investors are shrugging it all off. U.S. markets are on a record-breaking tear, despite their April freak-out over the potential consequences of Trump’s tariffs. The president softened and delayed some of those import taxes after the market reaction, especially among investors in the U.S. government bonds that undergird the global financial system. But as of last week, Trump’s tariffs of 15% on most imports are now broadly in effect.

Sonnenfeld predicts that it’ll take another markets sell-off — and much more dramatic signs that tariffs are damaging the U.S. economy — before CEOs feel empowered to oppose Trump more publicly. He expects inflation to worsen significantly by the end of the year, at which point, he said, business leaders will have more “air cover” to criticize the president.

Business leaders don’t want their criticism to “look like it’s just coming from an ideological perspective,” Sonnenfeld said. “They need to show a dollars-and-cents justification.”

In the meantime, he has a recommendation for how the titans of American capitalism can stand up for their independence — even if it’s also a tactic beloved by labor unions and other traditional critics of corporate executives and free-market capitalism.

“They can’t do it on their own,” Sonnenfeld said. “The only way you take down a bully is through collective action.”

Copyright 2025 NPR

TOKYO — As Japan’s defeat marking the end of WWII nears its 80th anniversary, and some events fade from living memory, history is hardly consigned to books. It lives on in unhealed wounds, still-simmering disputes, freshly unearthed discoveries, and historical lessons waiting to be learned.

The release of WWII-era military documents this year has given a boost to researchers digging into Japan’s notorious germ warfare program, which lasted from 1936 to 1945. And in China, the premiere of a film about this gruesome episode in history was postponed without explanation, causing an online outcry .

Titled 731 Biochemical Revelations in English, the film tells the story of Chinese victims of the Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731’s inhumane medical experiments.

When the screening was canceled and later pushed back to September without explanation, some film fans questioned the authorities’ motives, wondering whether the move was intended to avoid a spat that could damage fragile ties between Beijing and Tokyo.

“Just because the movie exposes scars, does that mean people should choose to forget that part of history?” asked state-run Hunan Satellite TV anchor Liu Jiaying in a social media video. “This film is not only a retelling of the past but also a warning to the future,” she added.

First-hand accounts are rare

One of the last eyewitnesses able and willing to speak about Unit 731 is 95 year-old Hideo Shimizu, who lives in central Japan’s Nagano prefecture.

He joined Unit 731’s Youth Corps at age 14 and arrived at unit headquarters in Japanese-occupied Northeast China in 1945, five months before the end of the war.

In an interview at his home, he says he assumed he would be given some manufacturing job, so he was surprised to see doctors in white lab coats at the headquarters.

Anthony Kuhn / NPR / NPR Former Unit 731 Youth Corps member Hideo Shimizu, 95, speaks during an interview at his home in Nagano prefecture, Japan, while pointing to a map of his former unit’s headquarters in northeast China.

He says he never imagined he would be doing anything related to medicine, much less working in a unit accused of dissecting live prisoners, some without anesthesia, infecting them with diseases or conducting germ warfare against Chinese soldiers and civilians.

Shimizu remembers that the first inkling he got that something terrible was happening was when he was led one day into a room filled with specimens of human organs in glass jars.

“The most shocking thing for me,” he recalls, “was a specimen of a whole female body with a fetus in its womb.”

Shimizu says he himself became seriously ill, after an older unit member gave him a piece of bread, and he believes that the unit carried out experiments on its own youth corps trainees.

As Japan’s defeat loomed, unit 731 members were instructed to destroy evidence — and witnesses. Unit 731 doctors called the people they experimented on “maruta,” or logs, in other words, not human.

“I did not see any of the maruta alive,” Shimizu says. “All I did was collect their bones and put them in a bag,” after they had been killed and their bodies burned.

Unit 731 is estimated to have killed around 3,000 people, while bioweapons developed by other branches of the program are believed to have killed far more.

Japan’s government has never apologized for Unit 731’s actions, and insists that it has found no evidence that the unit experimented on Chinese prisoners, even though a Tokyo court ruled in 2002 that the military had conducted such experiments and waged biological warfare.

Last year, Shimizu traveled to China to apologize . He has faced criticism in Japan for speaking out. Others, like Hideaki Hara, a former school teacher who has curated part of an exhibit dealing with Unit 731 at a local museum in Nagano, support him.

“When we talk about the war, it’s easier to talk about ourselves as victims, such as of the atomic bombings,” Hara says. “But our role as perpetrators is not often discussed. People don’t want to talk about it.”

Uncovering a secret history

But 77-year old Katsutoshi Takegami wants to talk. Several years ago, in his home in Nagano prefecture, he discovered a trunk that belonged to his father.

It contained photos that showed his father serving in Unit 1644, another part of Japan’s biowarfare program. Since then, Takegami has been researching his father’s military service.

Anthony Kuhn / NPR / NPR Katsutoshi Takegami, 77, speaks during an interview in his home in Nagano prefecture, Japan. Takegami began researching his father’s service in the army after finding photos in his father’s trunk several years ago.

“If you kill a lot of people, you become a hero and get promoted,” he says. “I was worried that my father had done something bad, and that’s how I got started investigating this thing.”

In May, at the request of researchers, Japan’s national archives made public Unit 1644’s personnel rosters. Takegami hopes to use the rosters to track down any surviving members of the unit.

“I feel the personnel rosters are a treasure,” says Lv Jing , a historian at Nanjing University, in the city where Unit 1644 was based. She believes the rosters will enable researchers to better understand the structure of Japan’s germ warfare system.

Anthony Kuhn / NPR / NPR (Left to right): A photo in an album brought back to Japan from China by Katsutoshi Takegami’s father shows what appears to be a Japanese doctor giving a Chinese girl an injection; A copy of the military record of Katsutoshi Takegami’s father Toshiichi Miyashita, showing that he served in the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 1644 in World War II; A photo from the same album shows Japanese soldiers filling their canteens during WWII.

Researchers in recent years have discovered a network of units, stretching from Unit 731 in the north to Unit 8604 in southern China’s Guangzhou city, and down to Unit 9420 in Singapore .

Lv says that each unit “tried to adapt to local conditions, solving problems in the environment they were fighting in, and using them against their enemy.”

With euphemistic names such as “anti-epidemic and water supply” units, their job was to keep their own troops healthy, while getting their enemies sick, by spreading diseases such as plague and malaria.

After the war, an international tribunal , known as the Tokyo Trial — similar to the Nuremburg trials in Germany — sentenced seven Japanese officials to death for war crimes.

But Lv Jing notes that Unit 731’s leaders returned to Japan, where many of them led illustrious careers as heads of medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

Wang Song / Xinhua via Getty Images / Xinhua via Getty Images Hideo Shimizu offers apology in front of an apology and anti-war monument at the former site of Unit 731 in Harbin, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, Aug. 13, 2024. Shimizu, a former member of Unit 731, the notorious Japanese germ-warfare detachment during World War II, identified the crimes of the Japanese army on Tuesday at the site where he served 79 years ago in China.

That’s because the U.S. gave Unit 731 leaders immunity from prosecution, and withheld evidence of their war crimes from the tribunal, in exchange for the data from the unit’s medical experiments. The U.S. government kept the details of Unit 731 and its immunity deal secret for decades.

“It is a lapse of justice to the highest degree,” says Cambridge University professor of East Asian History Barak Kushner . “And of course, the reason it’s kept out mainly is Americans want the data for themselves and they don’t want the Soviets to get it.”

Similarly, Kushner notes, the U.S. gave German scientists, including former Nazi party members, immunity in exchange for their help with U.S. missile and space programs, a program known as ” Operation Paperclip .”

In Japan, the U.S.’ overriding concern was to rebuild the country, Kushner says, into a bulwark against communism.

“I think the immunity offered in that situation reflects the tenor of the times, the political situation, and perhaps the limits of what sort of justice was achievable” for war crimes in the immediate post-war era, Kushner says.

It was one important episode, he adds, in which American ideals of justice took a back seat to self-interest and national security.

Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Nagano Prefecture and Tokyo

Copyright 2025 NPR

WASHINGTON — President Trump began to deploy National Guard troops, along with hundreds of federal agents, around Washington, D.C., this week, in a move to crack down on what he calls rampant, violent crime. The federal government has also taken over the D.C. Metropolitan police.

Some Washingtonians see the president’s move as a power play. Others say crime in parts of Washington is indeed a big problem and they welcome more resources, but they doubt deploying federal agents and soldiers is a solution.

Ava, a business consultant, lives in the U-Street neighborhood, a gentrifying part of the capital where there is a mix of younger professionals and older, long-time Washingtonians. The neighborhood is part of Ward 1, which has had seven homicides and 166 robberies so far this year, according to D.C. Metropolitan police.

Ava, who asked that NPR not use her last name because she is here on a green card and worries about retribution, says there have been shootings nearby, but she still sees her neighborhood as relatively safe and is comfortable walking home as late as 2 and 3 a.m. She says the president’s description of Washington does not match her reality.

“I’ve lived in cities my whole life, and I don’t think D.C. is more dangerous than other cities,” she says. “I think this summer actually has been … calmer than other summers.”

Washington has had some serious violent crime problems, including carjackings. For instance, in June 2023, amid a crime surge, there were 140 in the city.

But the U.S. Justice Department says last year violent crime in the District of Columbia hit a 30-year low.

Violent crime in Ward 1 is down nearly 30 percent this year so far over the same period last year, according to police.

Across the Anacostia River in Ward 8, where poverty is high, there have been 38 homicides so far this year – nearly five times as in Ward 1.

“I have a friend that actually got raped about three years ago,” says Alicia Cooper, who works as a property manager in the Congress Heights neighborhood. Cooper supports President Trump.

“I think he actually cares,” she says. On balance, she welcomes federal oversight of the police and a National Guard presence.

“The positive is a sense of security,” she says. “Residents, at the end of the day, they can feel secure that they know there is a higher level of chain command that is monitoring what’s going on.”

Joe McLean, 37, a lawyer who was visiting Congress Heights Wednesday, says the deployment of soldiers and federal agents is not about reducing crime, but flexing political power.

“Everybody knows that a show of force does not reduce crime, they don’t care about crime, and crime is down,” McLean says.

Instead, he says, he thinks the administration is trying to subjugate a majority-Black city.

“They see someone and they want to control them,” McLean says.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Maansi Srivastava / NPR / NPR Alicia Cooper, 39, poses for a portrait in southeast Washington, D.C., on Aug. 13, 2025. Cooper shares her thoughts on the deployment of the National Guard and federal police to D.C. She is a fan of President Trump and appreciates the feeling of safety the officers provide.

TEL AVIV — Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets every week to protest the ongoing war in Gaza and the government’s failure to bring home Israeli hostages.

But on Tuesday, a different kind of demonstration took place: hundreds of retired Israeli Air Force pilots rallied against the waroutside the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

It was the first time the group, which calls itself “555,” had gathered in person to oppose the Israeli cabinet’s latest decision — to launch an operation to capture Gaza City and expand the nearly two-year war. The crowd, most over 60 years of age, stood under a banner reading “Don’t kill hostages and soldiers” — a message that echoed throughout the speeches.

Many also stressed that their call to end the war wasn’t only about Israeli lives, but about the deaths of Palestinian civilians as well.

Among them was Dan Halutz, a former chief of staff of the Israeli military and ex-Air Force commander. Challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas still poses a significant threat, Halutz told the crowd, “Who among the senior commanders in the IDF believes Hamas is a strategic threat we can’t defend against? I don’t believe there’s such a person.”

Turning to Israel’s current chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, Halutz added that “the war has run its course. Gaza is destroyed — structurally and humanly. There’s no army there. The last Hamas operatives are hiding.”

Halutz also addressed Netanyahu directly, saying that if the prime minister had listened to President Joe Biden and ended the war a year and a half ago, “things would look different today.” The former commander accused the government of lacking the legitimacy to wage a war that “most of the public opposes.” He added that “the war in Gaza is eroding our morals, our values as human beings and as Jews. We will lose the right to send soldiers into battle if we don’t bring home those we already sent.”

Hagai Katz, one of Israel’s most decorated fighter pilots and part of the 1981 air strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, was also there to oppose the campaign to capture Gaza City. He told NPR that he rejected Netanyahu’s promise that the move would eliminate Hamas once and for all.

“We got promises from Netanyahu almost two years ago that only military pressure will eventually be effective. We heard it again and again,” said Katz. “That’s what we heard when he went into Rafah. That’s what he said when we moved to Khan Yunis. And now again, the same story about Gaza — but we believe we’ll get to the same outcome now, with more dead hostages and probably soldiers and Palestinians.”

When asked what he would say to Israeli pilots now striking Gaza from the air, Katz acknowledged the moral dilemma they face.

“That’s a very tough question because in today’s war, unlike 50 years ago, you don’t see the target. You get an accurate position or a picture, and you trust the system to check that there are not too many innocent bystanders around. On the other hand, realistically, we know that a lot of uninvolved people are getting killed. So they have a real dilemma: stop attacking or quit reserves — and in that, in some cases, quit protecting Israel — or keep going and kill innocent bystanders. It’s a major issue on the table.”

Would he fight in Gaza if he were still serving?

“Probably I wouldn’t,” he answered. “And if that means I would have to leave the service, I would’ve done that.”

The pilots’ protest adds to a recent petition by former heads of Israel’s security services calling for the war to end. Polls show a large majority of Israelis support ending the Gaza war in exchange for the hostages’ release. Yet the cabinet’s approval to launch a campaign to take control of Gaza City has drawn warnings from the current military chief, Israel media reported, who says such an operation could endanger the lives of the estimated 20 surviving hostages in Gaza.

So far, the army has not issued call-up orders for reserve soldiers to bolster mission. But the public debate — both in Israel and abroad — over whether the operation is legitimate is only expected to intensify as universities said they were planning to go on strike this coming Sunday.

Emily Feng contributed from Tel Aviv.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Ashley Carbonell is the Donor Engagement Manager at KPBS. In her role, she supports major and mid-level fundraising strategy and operations for the organization. She also manages the Producers Club, planning engagements for its members.

Ashley was born and raised in southeast San Diego and is an alumni of UCSD. She grew up on KPBS programming, gathering in the living room with her family to watch the latest episodes of Ken Kramer’s About San Diego . Before working at KPBS, she was at the nonprofit Forever Balboa Park and fundraised for the Botanical Building and Gardens.

She is involved in several professional organizations, serving on the local boards of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. In her free time Ashley enjoys spending time with her loved ones, going to the zoo and attending concerts.