Trump’s digital populism takes the stage

As Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, there was a jarring contrast hovering over the proceedings—between his populist style, embodied by his flurry of action to save TikTok, and the massive government apparatus of which he took control. The TikTok drama represents the crash of two powerful strains in American public life, a conflict that President 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, it seems the digital crowd has the upper hand in the latest, and maybe most potent, example of the new form of digital populism President 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.