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By Tim Wu
Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia and a contributing Opinion writer. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
Until last week, the controversy over Tiktok, the app for sharing videos belonging to the Chinese, involved issues of security and national censorship. But on Jan. 20, when President Trump signed an executive order taking a break from the federal application ban, the importance of the Tiktok controversy shifted. Now it’s also a story about how Trump’s management turns out to be determined to manage the economy.
Mr. Trump, apparently, will verify to negotiate an agreement with Tiktok to locate an American spouse to gain part of the company (the prohibition prohibits the distribution of the application in the United States as long as it remains controlled through a Chinese company . ) M. Trump indicated that, as he understands, the prohibition “gives the President the right to make an agreement” and that he needs “a war of offers. “
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 important than the deal itself is the approach. It hints at a new era in economic policy for the United States that is centered on a paramount leader (Mr. Trump) actively picking winners and losers. To be sure, the federal government, usually by way of Congress, has previously practiced industrial policy. But the centralization of policy in the president would be something different: more like a command economy, which in the United States might be called command capitalism.
That Mr. Trump likes being in charge and making deals on his own is nothing new. He has never exhibited much eagerness to work within the strictures of government. But during his first term as president, his instincts were thwarted by a variety of factors, including staff members not aligned with his new vision of the Republican Party, as well as institutional resistance throughout the government.
But this time, things are different. In the 8 years since MR. Trump assumed the presidency, a vast network of ideologically comprehensive employees and branches grew up around him, and entered at the time with more specific plans to succeed on institutional resistance. In this context, its management, its management of Tiktok suggests that its “winning selection” technique to the economy would possibly change the strip to the center, representing a main break with republican orthodoxy, in fact, US capitalism more widely.
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