Clicktatorship: How Trump’s Second Term Rewrote Governance for the Social Media Age
In Donald Trump’s second presidential term, every part of governing has become content. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security shares widespread footage of immigration raids directly on X, conspiracy theories now drive core policy decisions, and high-profile right-wing podcasters and online influencers hold senior roles across the federal government. To put it plainly: the second Trump administration is a deeply, fundamentally online administration.
Trump and his allies have long built power and profit from spreading misinformation and conspiracies, leveraging these narratives to gain visibility on social platforms and set the terms of national political debate. During his first term, Trump made headlines for announcing administration priorities and policy positions directly via Twitter. In the years since, social media platforms have grown far more hospitable to conspiracies and the people who promote them, allowing false claims to spread farther and faster than ever before. Trump’s political playbook has evolved to match this new landscape.
Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, argues that social media—especially right-wing online ecosystems—are no longer just a tool for Trump to control public narrative and perception. Today, the administration actively designs policy and makes key decisions based first on how those moves will be received online. Their top priority is satisfying what right-wing online communities care about, regardless of whether those concerns are rooted in fact.
WIRED spoke with Moynihan about his argument that the U.S. has entered an unprecedented new era of overlap between the internet and politics, which he terms “clicktatorship.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: To start, can you explain what a “clicktatorship” actually is?
Don Moynihan: A clicktatorship is a form of government that blends a social media-shaped worldview with authoritarian tendencies. What this means is that officials working in this system don’t just use online platforms as a channel for communication—their core beliefs, decision-making processes, and judgment are shaped by and directly responsive to the online world to an extreme degree. In a clicktatorship, everything is treated as content, even routine policy decisions and how government services are implemented.
The combination of platforms that actively enable and reward right-wing conspiracies, plus an administration that actively seeks out people willing to peddle those conspiracies, is what created the clicktatorship we see today. This system generates fabricated imagery and narratives to justify everything from deploying military forces to occupy U.S. cities to cutting funding to states that did not support the president—actions that would have shocked most Americans just a decade ago.
WIRED: Trump’s first term was defined by brash political showmanship. How is what we’re seeing now different from that era?
Don Moynihan: We can frame Trump’s first presidency as a “TV presidency.” Trump’s operating context was shaped by The Apprentice and Fox News, and you could understand his decision-making by following those outlets. His second presidency is a “Truth Social and X presidency”—you cannot interpret what’s happening without the context of those specific online platforms. So much of the messaging from the president and other senior policymakers is stuffed with inside references and coded language that only makes sense if you are already embedded in those online right-wing communities.
The style of political discourse has shifted too. We now see very senior officials adopting the rhetorical habits that perform well online. Take Pam Bondi bringing a list of snappy one-liners and printed X posts to a Senate hearing as her response to traditional congressional accountability. That is a perfect example of how online discourse is reshaping how public officials view their real-world, offline roles.
WIRED: Decades of research have documented how polarizing and harmful social media can be. What does it mean that our top political leaders are not just skilled at manipulating social media, but are also being manipulated by it?
Don Moynihan: Spending hours a day on social media distorts the thinking of everyone who does it, including policymakers and elected officials. Traditionally, we thought of politicians as communicators who used social media as a tool to get their message out. For a long time, that’s how most of us framed Trump: as someone extremely skilled at manipulating social media to build support. As a candidate, he rose to prominence within the GOP in large part because he was willing to peddle conspiracies, starting with the birther lie about Barack Obama.
But Trump and most of the people who work for him are also consumers of social media, even the darkest corners of the online right. They aren’t just manipulating the message—they are being manipulated by the online world they inhabit. They are addicted to the social media environment they occupy, and changed by it. That is a fundamentally different way of thinking about social media’s role in politics than what we have accepted for years. It’s even been documented that platform content moderators end up believing the conspiracies they are hired to police—no one is immune.
WIRED: For figures like Trump and Elon Musk, who have proven so adept at weaponizing false information, where is the line between strategic manipulation and believing your own hype?
Don Moynihan: Even the people at the top of this food chain are not immune to the effects of the content they promote. Elon Musk is the perfect example. Arguably the most consequential change in Trump’s first year of his second term was eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Part of that move came from ideological opposition to USAID within the administration, but it also happened because Musk genuinely believed baseless conspiracy theories about the agency that had no grounding in fact. This is almost certainly the first time a federal agency has been destroyed by online conspiracies, and the resulting cost in human lives could end up reaching millions.
WIRED: These leaders don’t just consume conspiratorial content—they create their own content to feed their online communities. How does that shape governance?
Don Moynihan: To stay active and influential in that online world, they frame every decision they make as potential content designed to perform well in that ecosystem. That means it is distorting both the judgment and the decision-making of the people running our government.
Take Trump’s discussion of deploying the National Guard to Portland, Oregon. If you only looked at online content about Portland and clashes between protesters and ICE, you would think the city was torn apart by chaos. In reality, daily life in Portland is completely normal—there is just one federal building that sees regular, small-scale friction from ongoing protests. But the president actively looks for imagery that will justify him extending and abusing his authority in these places. He understands that imagery is how you justify extreme action. The more content he can produce that claims order is collapsing, the more political permission he has to take even more extreme steps.
WIRED: Social media was long marketed as a democratizing force that gave a voice to people outside traditional power structures. How does that ideal hold up today?
Don Moynihan: We used to talk about the “platform-to-policymaking pipeline” in much more positive, measured terms. My own research has reached senior government officials because I was active on Twitter years ago—that felt like a reasonably democratic process, where people outside the DC bubble could get their ideas in front of leaders if those ideas were compelling enough. But the dynamics of that pipeline today are entirely controlled by the people who own the platforms.
The way Musk restructured Twitter (now X) prioritizes and amplifies more conspiratorial content, and rewards full-time professional online posters over actual subject-matter experts who know what they are talking about. Then the Trump administration actively seeks out these people, wants to put them in positions of power, and listens to their ideas. Extremely online policymakers naturally respond to the loudest voices from other extremely online communities.
WIRED: How should we think about the role of platforms, specifically X, in this entire system?
Don Moynihan: If you just describe the relationship between X, Musk, and the Trump administration in purely factual terms, it is very hard not to conclude that they are deeply intertwined: to some degree, X acts as an extension of the state, and the state also acts as an extension of Musk’s personal interests. The richest man in the world, who is also one of Trump’s largest donors, turned an influential global platform into a space that supports Trump’s policy agenda, then was invited to implement radical changes to the U.S. federal government, all while benefiting enormously from U.S. government contracts. They are legally independent entities, but their practical interdependence in Trump’s second term is so deep that you cannot understand the influence or power of one without examining the other.