Until last week, the controversy over TikTok, the Chinese-owned video sharing app, concerned questions of national security and censorship. But on Jan. 20, when President Trump signed an executive order pausing enforcement of the federal ban of the app, the significance of the TikTok controversy changed. It is now also a story about how the Trump administration seems intent on managing 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 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 eight years since Mr. Trump last assumed the presidency, an extensive network of ideologically sympathetic staff members and department-head nominees has developed around him, and he has entered his second term with more focused plans for overcoming institutional resistance. In this context, his handling of TikTok suggests that his “picking winners” approach to the economy may be moving from the fringe to the center, representing a major break from Republican orthodoxy — indeed, from American capitalism more generally.

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