Advertisement
Supported by
Guest Rehearsal
By Tim Wu
Mr. Wu is a professor at Columbia and a contributing opinion writer. She served at the National Economic Council as Special Assistant to the President for Competition and Technology Policy from 2021 to 2023.
Until last week, the controversy about Tiktok, the application of the exchange of videos belonging to the Chinese, implied national security and censorship issues. But on January 20, when President Trump signed a decree taking a break from the prohibition of the federal application, the importance of Tiktok’s controversy changed. Now it is also a story about how Trump’s management is deciding to manage the economy.
Mr. Trump, it appears, will try to personally broker a deal with TikTok to find an American partner to acquire about half the company. (The ban forbids the distribution of the app in the United States as long as it remains controlled by a Chinese company.) Mr. Trump has indicated that, as he understands it, the ban “gives the president the right to make a deal” and that he wants “a bidding war.”
As far as TikTok is concerned, this means that the president will probably select a new owner for the app from his circle of wealthy friends and acquaintances. (Reports this past weekend suggest that he is looking for the software company Oracle, whose executive chairman is Larry Ellison, and several other investors to take over worldwide operations.) Whether ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in China, will go along with such a deal and whether the deal would satisfy the law remain open questions.
But more vital than the agreement itself is the approach. It alludes to a new era in the US economic policy. UU. Which focuses on a key leader (MR. Trump) that actively selects the winners and losers. Undoubtedly, the Federal Government, through Congress, has practiced in the past a commercial policy. But the centralization of politics in the president would be anything different: more as an command economy, which in the United States could be called command capitalism.
The fact that Mr. Trump likes to be in the rate and make the agreements alone is nothing new. He never showed much preference for paintings within government restrictions. But during his first term as president, his instincts were frustrated through a variety of factors. , adding employees not aligned with their new vision for the Republican Party, as well as institutional resistance to government.
But this time, things are different. During the 8 years that followed the last time Trump assumed the presidency, a vast network of ideologically and applicants for the head of the branch evolved around him, and entered at the time with more specific plans to succeed on institutional resistance. In this context, its Tiktok control suggests that its technique “collecting winners” of the economy can pass from the strip to the center, which represents a primary break of republican orthodoxy, in fact, of US capitalism in general.
We have recovering the content of the article.
JavaScript turn on in the configuration of your browser.
Thank you for your patience as we determine access. If you’re in reader mode, log out and log in to your Times account or we subscribe to all times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already signed? Connect.
Do you want all the time? Subscribe.
Ad