| The first time Donald Trump became president, it sparked a seemingly endless debate among media mavens and Washington watchers: Can the leader of the free world govern by tweet? As it turned out, the answer was … “sort of.” While not an official government channel, Trump’s Twitter feed served as a powerful agenda-setting tool and a window into his mercurial mind, at least until he got banned. Now, the former president is set to return to the White House under a very different set of digital circumstances. Twitter has become X, owned by Trump’s “first buddy” Elon Musk, who has restored his account and turned the entire platform into a megaphone for the next GOP administration. Governance by social media is back, with one key twist. Elon Musk, with his 200-plus million followers, is trying to drive it from outside the White House. With Trump still quite financially invested (at least for the moment) in his own platform Truth Social, it remains to be seen whether his X feed will serve the function it did in his first White House. The evidence is already on display, however, that it is serving an important function for Musk. He has tweeted (sorry, posted) as of this writing … 59 times since midnight November 12, on topics ranging, in vintage Trumpian fashion, from declining birthrates to university accreditation to a squabble with a “Saturday Night Live” actress . He also issued a veiled threat that Republicans who stray from his vision for MAGA orthodoxy could be the targets of his America PAC in the 2026 primaries. Musk isn’t just using his platform to muse and settle beefs, but to accomplish actual goals. He originally proposed a “Department of Government Efficiency” during a conversation with Trump on X. Trump said he would create such a commission (which transition leader Howard Lutnick recently clarified would operate outside government). He reposted a Trump campaign video from 2022 in which the former president proposed cracking down on federal disinformation policy — after which Trump re-reposted it , seemingly making a fresh presidential promise. POLITICO’s Robin Bravender reported this afternoon on Musk’s continued efforts to do government-by-posting, boosting his own proposals to “shrink government overreach” and stating his resolve to “ensure … maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration.” Musk isn’t ignoring Capitol Hill, either: He ran a poll regarding who should become Senate majority leader that featured, naturally, his preferred candidate Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) running away with the competition. With Trump muted, if no longer muzzled, on the platform that still serves as the “digital town square” for Washington and capitals across the world, a second Trump administration’s digital face might less resemble the personal, top-down character of Trump 1.0, than the rapid-fire, reactive, right-coded flavor of Musk’s X circa 2024. Steven Livingston, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, described X’s civic function as bridging that inchoate political energy with real-life activism and organizing, the platform serving as “a bullhorn that announces the opportunity to come out for a communal moment.” That’s exactly what Musk did in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, as a flood of pro-Trump propaganda swamped the platform and urged its users to turn their MAGA-posting into real-life civic action. Livingston warned, however, that platforms like X are less effective as top-down vehicles for the dissemination of political information, but as spaces that allow users to vent and then form communities with the like-minded. “If you think of social media platforms as places where something like an organization can form through groups or hashtags … think of QAnon as an organization. You can't knock on its door. It doesn't have a president, but it has purpose-driven behavior and it brings together people who would otherwise be disparate, spread out, and unconnected,” Livingston said. Musk clearly understands this, whether consciously or instinctively : his use of the platform is less as a Trumpian author figure than the leader of a manic startup brainstorming session — someone who points or redirects energy to his favored causes or beliefs, often through his monosyllabic “Wow” or “Yeah” replies. Just from today: to a professor who told Donald Trump Jr. “while your dad's victory is Godsent, the battle [against “woke”] is FAR from won,” Musk replies simply: “True” . To a proposal for a hazily-defined “24/7 declassification office” in Trump’s next administration: “Good idea”. On a call to reconsider spending on Ukraine’s war against Russia: “Yeah”. Musk isn’t just pumping up the right-wing information ecosystem, he is the right-wing information ecosystem, both in his actual ownership of X and his relentless signal-boosting of the various activists trying to stamp their ideological beliefs on the febrile young second Trump administration. “Send http://X.com links to friends, especially of actual source material, so that they know the truth of what’s going on,” Musk wrote this morning, pitching the platform as a superior and more truthful alternative to the “legacy media.” Trump used Twitter in his first term to dictate policy and messaging from the top down, like the 20th-century CEO that he is. Musk’s vision for X in the second Trump White House is more like a startup: loose, unregulated, and agile, flitting from one pet cause to the next in the hyperactive nature so familiar to its regular users. That, digital observers like Livingston say, could potentially make the digital character of a second Trump administration more radical than the first, putting Musk’s hypermodern, crowdsourced vision of public speech at its center, driving it in an ever more-extreme direction. “There’s something about the very ontology of a digitally constituted organization, that makes it difficult for a political party to hold at bay the most radical elements,” said Livingston, citing a 2013 scholarly work on the topic . “We’re getting away from an individual causal factor and saying, let's look at this at an aggregate level, at an organizational level.”
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