How TikTok is burnishing Trump's strongman image
If you kiss the ring hard enough, laws disappear.
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You’re forgiven for forgetting about TikTok for the last couple of days, what with the horrorshow avalanche of executive orders and gleeful deployment of Nazi salutes (plural!) from the world’s richest man.
Nonetheless, TikTok is ostensibly banned in the United States as Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voted only nine months ago to outlaw the app unless its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to sell it. The US Supreme Court even upheld the law just last week. However, TikTok lives, thanks to the whims of Donald Trump, the same person who, in August 2020, issued an executive order giving ByteDance 45 days to sell the app or see it banned.
Trump has been extremely transparent that he flip-flopped on TikTok because the app helped him win the election last year, in part because it became a hotbed for criticism of Biden’s support for Israel.
“We won young people and I think that's a big credit to TikTok,” Trump told Newsmax earlier this month (even though he in fact lost the youth vote). “So I'm not opposed to TikTok ... I had a very good experience with TikTok."
Lost in the current discourse about TikTok is an important conversation about whether it violates the First Amendment to ban a social media app based on national security concerns about its Chinese-owned parent company. Also lost is a debate about whether it’s fair to single out TikTok over worries about user privacy, data harvesting, and manipulative algorithms when such issues are common to all social media platforms. There’s also a discussion to be had about whether singling out TikTok is racist — though there’s a good argument it is. Instead, what’s happening here is the creeping oligarchy of companies and capital aligning around an authoritarian president, with everyone fully aware that sucking up to Trump personally, ideally along with staggering sums of cash, is the only way to evade scrutiny.
Trump’s attack on TikTok, followed by his cynical post-election embrace of it as ByteDance executives bend the knee to him and him alone, is a dynamic we’ll likely see play out repeatedly over the next four years. And TikTok isn’t alone in its decision to grovel directly to Trump. The big social media platforms — X, Meta, and now TikTok — have all shown that they plan to survive by doing whatever he wants.
The art of the deal
To be scrupulously fair to Trump, he isn’t the only person who reversed course on TikTok.
Once it was clear that the public opposed the ban and that the Supreme Court might not step in to save legislators from themselves, the Biden administration spent last week trying to figure out how to keep TikTok alive. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Markey introduced legislation to delay by 270 days the initial January 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold, despite having voted for the ban in the first place.
The problem these efforts faced, however, is that TikTok wasn’t interested in working with the Biden administration or Senate Democrats to fix the problem. And why would they be, when Democrats are hobbled by a persistent inclination to actually follow laws rather than treat everything as an episode of The Apprentice, where flattering Trump as a master dealmaker is all that matters?
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It’s exactly the latter approach that TikTok took. The ban required Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores or face steep fines for each user who downloaded the app. What it did not do, however, was penalize anyone who already had the app on their phone or accessed TikTok on the web. So the real financial peril would initially fall on Google and Apple if they kept the app available.
After the Supreme Court decision last week, the Biden administration suggested it would not penalize those companies for continuing to host the app, a move TikTok said didn’t provide them enough “necessary clarity and assurance,” and they would therefore shut down in the United States on January 19.
Thus began the public kayfabe of TikTok pretending that only Trump could fix it, knowing full well that he would happily go along. So the app went abruptly, ostentatiously dark on the evening of the January 18, only to pop back up some 12 hours later on January 19 with a gushing message to Trump: “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”
One might note, of course, that Trump was not president on January 19. One might also note that what Trump did promise — basically, that he would not enforce a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court — is not functionally any different than what Biden or Markey were trying to offer, albeit without a demand the company show them personal fealty.
But if TikTok had simply left the lights on for those 12 hours and waited for the incoming administration to decide how to enforce the ban, it would have missed the opportunity to let Trump be the savior who brought the app back from the dead. And the one thing social media companies have learned about Trump is that their success will rise and fall with his impulses.
When social media platforms let Trump and his hangers-on say and do whatever they like, he loves them. Once X was purchased by president-unelect Elon Musk, it became transformed into a MAGA megaphone and no longer faces scrutiny from Trump. That’s a change from January 2021, when Trump complained that then-Twitter was “not about FREE SPEECH” after it banned his account following the insurrection.
Though Meta didn’t change hands, it still transformed — or more accurately, perhaps, deformed — to meet the new Trump era. CEO Mark Zuckerberg got rid of third-party fact-checking on Facebook, calling it “politically biased,” and revised its hateful speech policy to explicitly allow for attacks on trans people. Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the inauguration, went to church with Trump Monday morning, and hosted a reception Monday night.
For the inauguration itself, Zuckerberg, along with Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google head Sundar Pichai, was basically in the front row. Nothing says “incipient oligarchy” like an inauguration dominated by the richest men in the world, private citizens all.
Given all this, no one should have been the least bit surprised that TikTok is doing everything it can to butter up to Trump. On the Saturday night before the inauguration, it hosted a group of MAGA influencers at a Washington Capitals hockey game at Capital One Arena, the same place where the next day at a rally, Trump declared that “we need to save TikTok because we’re talking about a tremendous audience that goes to TikTok.” TikTok also threw $50,000 toward a party for Gen Z Trump supporters. TikTok CEO Shou Chew even showed up to church on Monday with Trump and sat next to incoming Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for the inauguration itself.
Trump’s first idea about how to keep TikTok alive was to propose something absolutely unworkable and absurd.
“My initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the US gets a 50 percent ownership in a joint venture set up between the US and whichever purchase we so choose,” he mused on Truth Social the day before his inauguration.
But it’s unclear how this would solve the alleged national security concerns about TikTok — that it’s hoovering up user data and manipulating content to serve the interests of the Chinese government. It’s also unclear how it would work for the US government to jointly own a private social media platform in conjunction with another private company that the United States itself alleges is nothing but a front for Chinese interests.
Ultimately, Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office that blocks enforcement of the ban for 75 days. During the signing, he declared that the US “should be entitled to get half of TikTok” if there was a sale, speculated that the purchase would allow the government to police the site, and threatened tariffs against China if it didn’t approve such a sale. He also dismissed concerns about the exploitation of children in a remarkably uncaring way, telling reporters, “remember, TikTok is largely about kids. Young kids. If China is gonna get information about young kids, I don't know — to be honest with you, I think we have bigger problems than that.” (Watch below.)
In a sane country, these antics would raise serious concerns about the president’s judgement. But in Trumplandia they were barely a blip on the news radar as the new administration flooded the zone with regressive executive orders and egregious pardons.
A republic, if you can keep it
If you’re wondering how an executive order can override a law upheld by the nation’s highest court, you’re not alone.
The law requires ByteDance to sell the company to a non-Chinese owner, period. An extension provision could have delayed enforcement for 90 days, but only if there’s a likely buyer. However, it’s not even clear the extension provision applies here, because the law already went into effect. The law also has a 20 percent cap on foreign ownership, making the idea of ByteDance going halfsies with the federal government somewhat impossible. (Mr. Beast is reportedly seriously interested in fronting a group to buy the platform, and Musk’s name has been floated too.)
The New York Times noted that the arrangement raises “serious questions about the limits of presidential power and the rule of law in the United States.” The paper’s coverage of Trump has been so unwarrantedly favorable that it was surprising they published such a statement. But that observation is mealy-mouthed and obscures the deep crisis we face: laws now mean nothing if Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like them. It doesn’t matter that Congress passed the law. It doesn’t matter that the Supreme Court upheld that law. It doesn’t even matter that Trump himself was the impetus for the law. Trump changed his mind, and the whole of the world is forced to change with him.
TikTok’s actions show that courting Trump personally works very well — so well that laws just disappear. There’s no reason that any other company won’t follow this same path if it has enough money to do so. We can debate whether such a state of affairs is technically an oligarchy, but such a debate will sound very similar to the debate over whether Trump could be called a fascist. While we’re fighting about those technicalities, Trump will just keep steamrolling along, rewarding only those who show him loyalty and money.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
"Democrats are hobbled by a persistent inclination to actually follow laws." To me, this sentence best illustrates the intractable position of Democrats as well as any and every still law abiding entity. How do you follow the law and win when dealing with a lawless adversary. You have to find a way to get through and wake the sleeping giant that is (hopefully) the majority of the population who are and want to remain faithful to the laws that created and undergird democracy. And you have to do this while free speech is still allowed.
The big point is Trumps failure to enforce a law of Congress upheld by the Supreme Court. It’s authoritarianism we should be discussing.