Will Donald Trump save TikTok from Joe Biden? He’s going to try
The worries over TikTok’s impending shutdown have now reached a full-fledged panic among the site’s user base.
But at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump sees an opportunity to play the hero for millions of Americans who use the app daily — and to do so by spurning his onetime rival, Joe Biden.
Legislation passed by Congress and signed by Biden will take effect on Sunday: It forces the sale, divestiture, or ban of the app if the two former options are not taken. The ban would not make usage of the app illegal, however, it will prevent app stores from allowing users to download it.
TikTok’s executives are getting ahead of the impending restriction. They plan to take the app down for all U.S. users — preventing any usage at all — beginning on Sunday. The intent is to enrage the app’s massive fanbase, and exert further political pressure on Washington. Those users pushed competitor RedNote close to the top of app store download lists on Thursday as a sudden desire for a TikTok-alternative set in.
The company has tried these kinds of D.C. pressure campaigns before. They haven’t ended well.
But Donald Trump is a different story.
“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” the incoming president has said about the app. “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?”
With reporting in The Washington Post on Wednesday indicating that the president-elect is looking for options to prevent the ban through executive action and TikTok’s CEO now on the Trump inauguration guest list, one thing is abundantly clear: the benefits presented by the app for a social media-savvy president clearly outweigh any concern he has for the national security concerns that lawmakers in Washington believe the app poses.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s soon-to-be White House national security adviser, said as much this week: “TikTok itself is a fantastic platform. We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”
Those policymakers on the Hill who supported forcing owner ByteDance to divest or sell the app have as of yet failed to convince the American public of the necessity of such action. After years of debating the issue, polling from the Pew Research Center in September of last year found that support for a ban only slightly edged out opposition — and trailed the share of Americans who had no opinion. This comes despite leaders of both parties arguing that the ownership of TikTok by a Chinese company could allow the Chinese government to harvest the personal information of American TikTok users, something the company strongly denies.
A move to reverse the ban of TikTok (either through “dealmaking” and finding financial backing for a U.S. purchase of the app, or through more direct means) would likely be a small political victory for the president-elect, at least outside of the Capital beltway.
The question in Trump’s mind is not whether to reverse the ban: It’s whether he’ll be successful in doing so. The law, passed by Congress and signed by his predecessor, cannot be waved away with a pen stroke. Trump learned that lesson the hard way, in 2017, with his doomed bid to repeal Obamacare. A formal repeal effort would require winning over largely the same Congress that just supported the ban, another tough prospect.
One sign he’s ready to fight that battle: the decision on Wednesday to remove Mike Turner, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, from the panel. It was carried out by Speaker Mike Johnson, reportedly at the president-elect’s behest.
Trump’s incoming administration could announce to companies like Apple and Google that it will not enforce the ban and prosecute the tech giants for keeping TikTok on app stores. But that could leave it open to legal challenges — and the president’s nominee to lead the Justice Department pledged to enforce all federal laws during her Senate confirmation hearing this week.
The next few days will be pivotal for an app that serves millions of users across the country. But in a week where Democrats are already seeing Trump’s team take credit for a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Gaza (one that was inked days after the incoming president’s envoy visited the region) it’s worth questioning just how many free layups the Biden team will let Trump make before next Monday.