The problem is that if what they say were true it would be hard to believe that Gelsinger, the main supporter of 18A as the savior of the company, would have accepted to be retired before enjoying the success of his efforts.

The forced retirement can be explained only in two ways, either the 18A is projected to be a failure and USA has lost any chances to become competitive with TSMC, or the retirement has been imposed by political forces that are completely incompetent and which do not understand anything about the semiconductor industry, and also in this case it seems likely that USA will fail to become great again in semiconductor IC manufacturing.