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Like a good platform, Mr. Trump has found a way to bring communities with relevant interests together while not thinking too much about the long-term costs.

Like all platforms, Mr. Trump is a natural engine of radicalization — for those who support him and those who oppose him.

The new platform announces itself with a catchy motto explicitly stating its intentions: “Make the world more open and connected,” as Facebook declared in its early days; “Make America Great Again,” as the president declares today. But still we avoid asking the hard question: What would happen if the nascent platform achieves those goals? We don’t think too hard about any of it. Even those who don’t like it partake in the platform, feeding it our attention. What’s the harm? After all, it’s free.

For this reason, like any good platform, Mr. Trump is a time suck. Evenings, weekends, holidays, you name it — are all derailed by his demand for your time and attention. Both are the ultimate currency to the Trump platform, allowing him to remain the central figure in American life.

And then there’s our relationship to the Trump platform, which should feel familiar to tech observers. It arrives unexpectedly and is nothing quite like what came before it. The shiny object becomes a media darling. Since it’s a novel experience, the new platform is not taken seriously as a world-changing force

Consuming more of him leads only to a hardening of one’s ideology. Each rally and every successive tweet is more extreme than the last, propelling most of Mr. Trump’s followers deeper down the rabbit hole and intensifying their enthusiasm or disgust for the president

In time we learn that’s not the case. The platform, we find, demands a great deal. Slowly and sneakily it takes and takes little pieces of us. Our data, our attention. It’s not until it’s too late that we learn the platform isn’t free — it only appears so. We learn, to our dismay, that in fact we’ve paid a great price.