The Atlantic [no paywall]: Even the administration’s budget proposals read like Truth Social posts. “…No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was questioned by the Supreme Court on the lack of an appeals option for Cook, he suggested that Cook could simply have made her case on Truth Social. In the clicktatorship, due process is reduced to the right to post. You can see it everywhere. The administration’s official social-media feeds pump out far-right xenophobic memes and celebrate deportations with ASMR videos of undocumented immigrants in shackles. Just days before the killing of Pretti, the White House posted an image of a woman who was arrested after a protest at a church in Minnesota. It had been edited, presumably using generative AI, to show the arrestee as weeping uncontrollably. The effect is to reinforce an impression of dominance and control. Truth matters less than attention. Reporters who pointed out the manipulation were mocked by a White House spokesperson who posted: “uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!” (“The success of the White House’s social media pages speak for itself,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email. “Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the President’s extremely popular agenda.”)

Aspects of the clicktatorship existed during Trump’s first term, when the president used Twitter as a bully pulpit. But it has ratcheted up to new levels in his second go-round. His appointees are more likely to be keyboard warriors. They are obsessed with spectacle, and every government decision presents a potential opportunity to own the libs. Our government lost 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s last year, but seemingly has more posters than ever…”