Trump: Political Power as a Digital Platform

The Digital Age and the Platform State

Historically, the state was built upon solid, tangible institutions—constitutional, legislative, judicial, executive, media, and civil institutions—tasked with managing the fundamental processes of governing and directing the state and organizing the lives of its citizens.

To ensure that these processes produced their intended outcomes—maximizing the state’s power across all dimensions and enhancing citizens’ well-being in its various forms—laws, regulations, and procedures were established to facilitate the achievement of these goals.

Within this framework, political power was exercised according to well-established and precise traditions. Political orientations, plans, policies, and decisions were formulated within the various institutions of the political system, operating at different levels. They were then announced and implemented through the institutions entrusted with carrying them out.

The digital age, however, with its communications technologies and intelligent systems, has imposed a new mode of exercising political power that transcends traditional institutions. This new mode is embodied in the digital platform.

To varying degrees, digital platforms have replaced traditional state institutions and have become spaces through which political power is exercised. Much of the recent political literature agrees that Donald Trump has been a pioneer in establishing “the digital platform as political power.”

One researcher comments on this transformation:

“For Trump, the digital platform is no longer merely a technological tool for announcing his decisions or addressing his supporters. Rather, he has turned it into a space for exercising political power by bypassing its natural legislative, executive, judicial, and partisan channels, to the point where the American presidency often appears to have moved from the Oval Office to the digital platform.”

It would not be an exaggeration, therefore, to argue that through his persistent practices, Trump has established what might be called the “Platform State.”

2. From the Institutional Sphere to the Algorithmic Sphere

The use of digital platforms to exercise political power represents, according to many analysts, a fundamental transformation by every measure.

Political power increasingly merges with the digital platform through political ideas and statements that emerge instantaneously, spread at extraordinary speed, and possess the ability to capture attention across social classes, generations, and demographic groups both within national borders and beyond them.

The book The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource examines how material disseminated through social media, including digital platforms, is transformed into an endless stream of data and information.

Algorithms are not merely technological tools. They are intelligent mechanisms capable of rapidly rereading and analyzing an infinite volume of data, information, facts, and conclusions; systematically organizing them; and presenting knowledge, ideas, and trends to users—whether questioners, researchers, or citizens—across a wide range of fields. In doing so, they turn this material into a continuous source of attention.

Within this context, the relationship between citizens and political power is changing.

Citizens no longer receive politics primarily through newspapers or official speeches. Instead, they encounter an endless flow of short messages, videos, and posts selected by algorithms according to their previous interests.

The citizen therefore no longer interacts directly with the state, but rather with a digital version of the state that has been reordered and presented by algorithms.

This gives rise to what might be called the “algorithmic citizen,” whose political consciousness is shaped within a digital environment created by platforms more than by educational institutions or traditional media.

The real danger here is the decline of long-term institutional thinking in favor of the immediate management of events, governed by indicators of views and engagement rather than by measures of efficiency and effectiveness.

3. “Clicktatorship”

This qualitative transformation toward the emergence of the Platform State/Platform Power prompted American political writer Donald Moynihan to write an article in the liberal-progressive American magazine The Atlantic, founded in 1857, entitled “Donald Trump Has Built a Clicktatorship.”

The author combines the words “Click”—a click or button press—and “Dictatorship” to create the term “Clicktatorship.”

In the article, Moynihan observes how Trump’s second administration is no longer simply an administration that uses social media as a tool of political communication. Instead, it represents a new model of governance that he describes as a clicktatorship, in which digital platforms become the environment where political decisions are produced independently of traditional institutions, and success is measured by views and engagement rather than by policy effectiveness or respect for institutions.

The article opens a broader field for reflection on the phenomenon of the “Platform State/Clicktatorship” and its implications.

For example, it draws attention to the fact that administration officials have increasingly come to view “Everything as Content”—everything as material that can be published and circulated.

Economic and international crises, deportation operations, and even judicial and partisan disputes, among other matters, are presented as content to be injected into the digital sphere and contested there. This shifts the discussion of such issues outside their traditional arenas.

The author points out that Trumpian political power has increasingly exercised a substantial portion of its responsibilities through the creation of visual moments and their widest possible dissemination, regardless of whether democratic governance, institutional integrity, and the quality of legislation and decision-making are guaranteed.

The priority is to keep public attention alive, even if doing so comes at the expense of “undermining institutions,” as discussed in the 2025 book Overcoming Trumpism: How to Save American Democracy.

Trump no longer needs to wait for institutional reports, the outcome of parliamentary debates, or recommendations from his political party before announcing his views and his administration’s position.

The platform gives him the legitimacy to exercise his powers directly, including the ability to dominate the public sphere by addressing millions of citizens without intermediaries. It also allows him to reshape the priorities of public debate on a daily basis.

Thus, the platform has ceased to be merely a means of communication. It has become a parallel institution and a structural component of contemporary political power.

In conclusion, it is perhaps no coincidence that the Platform State and Clicktatorship have emerged alongside the rise of the digital oligarchy—an oligarchic order combining feudal characteristics with digital capitalism.

This is a transformation that demands extensive research and deeper understanding.

Originally published in Al-Masry Al-Youm.