In his final year in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to limit TikTok. The logic was perfectly evident: The popular social-media app is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and employs a secret algorithm to determine which memes are presented to users, giving it enormous and unaccountable influence over American news consumption.
But Thursday night, while the political class was training its attention on President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Trump reversed himself. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he wrote. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
The timing of this reversal is interesting. After years of express concern, Congress is moving rapidly to pass a bill to force the Chinese government to divest from TikTok. TikTok has described this as a “ban,” which is erroneous, because it would only require a change of ownership without banning the product. A House committee voted 50-0 to approve the bill, an unusual display of bipartisan unanimity.
One American who does not share this goal is Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in TikTok and has reportedly threatened to cut off funding to Republicans who support the divestment bill.
Last week, Yass visited Mar-a-Lago, where Trump praised him as “fantastic,” and media reports touted that Yass could potentially contribute generously to Trump’s campaign.
Of course, it would be odd for Trump to leap to the defense of the Chinese Communist Party. But it would hardly be unprecedented. In 2020, he repeatedly praised Beijing’s leadership in fighting COVID while hoping to land a trade deal that would help his reelection campaign. Trump also maintains a bank account in China, the New York Times found in 2020, one of innumerable damning facts about the former president that the public has forgotten because they’ve been crowded out by other damning facts.
But corruption may not be necessary to explain Trump’s posture. TikTok has alarmed conservatives with its left-wing slant. And if you think Joe Biden is controlled by the woke left, as most conservatives apparently do, then you see TikTok as an agent of his interests.
But a more realistic appraisal of its effect is that TikTok promotes radical-left views on the Israel-Palestine conflict that cast Biden as a genocidaire while fostering a general air of doomerism that is burdensome to an incumbent president trying to convince the country he’s made it better. In the long run, perhaps TikTok pushes the country leftward. In the short run, it may well help Trump. And his own short-run personal interest is obviously the only thing Trump has ever cared about.
