“The whole thing strikes me as kind of a shakedown,” Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economist who advised George W. Bush, told The Times. “It’s like when the mob comes to visit: ‘Nice business you have here. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.’”
Nvidia sits at the heart of President Trump’s industrial policy, which has taken on a pay-for-play feel. Nvidia agreed in August to pay the U.S. government a 15 percent cut of chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses.