Donald Trump being sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. | Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AFP via Getty Images
As Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States today, there was a jarring contrast hovering over the proceedings — between his populist style, embodied by his flurry of weekend action to save TikTok, and the massive government apparatus of which he took control.
Before placing his hand on the Bible and taking the oath of office, Trump had spent the weekend trying to save the app through a still-vague “deal” between TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, the platforms that host and share the TikTok app, and his own administration-in-waiting.
As many observers have pointed out, the effort to keep the app alive after Jan. 19 was — and still arguably is — in defiance of the law.
The TikTok drama represents the crash of two powerful strains in American public life, a conflict that Trump has a flair for capitalizing on and even encouraging.
One is the full weight of America’s legal and democratic institutions — the Congress that overwhelmingly passed the law; the president who signed it; the Supreme Court that upheld it.
On the other side are Trump and TikTok: an app with 170 million upset American users, verging on an unruly mob, and a president with a drive to deliver populist “wins.”
For now its seems the digital crowd has the upper hand, in the latest, and maybe most potent, example of the new form of digital populism Trump has embraced.
From the beginning, Trump’s political rise has been fueled by the power of tech platforms as an outside route to public attention, and a way to bypass traditional governance by talking directly to people whether via Twitter, or podcasts, or his own social-media platform.
TikTok is an especially effective tool for this form of populist governance, as its mysterious but powerful algorithm keeps users hooked and makes it a direct, if roughly sketched, reflection of the vox populi.
That power also poses a risk, as even some of the ban’s supporters will acknowledge. The Foundation for American Innovation economist Samuel Hammond, who approves of the ban but enjoys the app itself, acknowledges its capacity to entertain and captivate while remaining skeptical of its Chinese ownership.
“An algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself is inherently dual-use. It can make you laugh and it can subtly shape your worldview,” Hammond said. “TikTok's success at mobilizing mass opposition against the ban in a sense illustrates the danger.”
There’s serious support for the idea that these platforms enable a new form of popular governance. In a 2024 essay titled “Digital Governance: Between Populism and Technocracy,” Rogers Brubaker, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles pointed out that figures like Trump and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi have used social media to build connections with voters that feel more “authentic” than those voters’ connections to institutions like Congress or the Supreme Court.
“Ubiquitous ‘trending’ algorithms, for example, do not simply register what is popular for a particular public at a particular moment … they amplify and reinforce the popularity that they register,” he wrote.
Brubaker argues that “technocracy,” which is traditionally associated with anti-populist government by a class of tech-savvy “elites,” isn’t necessarily incompatible with Trump’s brand of populism.
One only needs to look at the promises of Elon Musk and other figures on the tech right to “reinvent” government and make it more “efficient” — in Musk’s case as part of an insular tech-world committee, with no popular input — to see how Trump’s orbit blends corporate technocratic government with grassroots populism.
Hence Musk crowing on X recently that “Government power needs to be restored to the people in America, rather than be held by an enormous, unaccountable bureaucracy!” Unmentioned was the fact that the “bureaucracy” is run through our electoral system, and his own platform is privately owned and controlled by black-box algorithms.
In the new formulation championed by Musk and Trump, approbation on platforms like X or TikTok justifies any means, if necessary overriding those democratic institutions, to make the will of “the people” heard. While that form of government’s resilience in court remains to be seen, the next four years will feature plenty more of it.
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vivek out
Vivek Ramaswamy. | Alex Brandon/AP
Vivek Ramaswamy will leave the Department of Government Efficiency to run for governor of Ohio.
POLITICO’s Holly Otterbein and Adam Wren reported this morning that DOGE’s co-founder, along with Elon Musk, is out, according to a person close to him granted anonymity to speak freely. Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial bid is expected to launch next week.
Adam reported over the weekend on rumors Ramaswamy would go, which some in Trump’s orbit see as clearing the way for Musk to take more personalized control of the outside-government committee that will recommend cuts to the federal budget.
“Elon basically runs the show,” an informal adviser to Trump told Adam, adding “Time is their biggest enemy. We’ll see.”
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tiktok inaction
The chaos of TikTok’s ban, and then return, reveals just how much Washington has lagged in treating tech platforms with the seriousness they deserve.
Your DFD author reported Sunday evening on the policy context of the ban. Many tech-world observers see Congress as having wasted time with surface-level debates while not giving themselves more practical tools to deal with the risks they see TikTok posing.
“For the last decade Congress has focused on content moderation, the one aspect of tech policy they are constitutionally prohibited from regulating,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate staffer who has worked at Facebook, Twitter and Google. “Had they focused on more relevant issues like privacy and transparency, we could have had a more thoughtful and effective approach to social media.”
As tech moguls line up to celebrate Trump’s inauguration, that’s unlikely to change, and TikTok seemingly isn’t going anywhere either: POLITICO’s Sophia Cai reported that Sunday night TikTok officials and influencers flooded Washington to celebrate Trump’s inauguration and their app’s return.
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