The Trump TikTok flip-flop continues as the 47th president has shoved his finger into the eye of Congress. With scant legal authority, he has paused the divestment of the app by ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent. After issuing an executive order on point, the president then held out the possibility that Larry Ellison of Oracle, a Trump-backer, or Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, would scoop-up TikTok.
This is what crony capitalism looks like. Trump’s delay contravenes the law Congress passed last spring, which set a 19 January 2025 divestment deadline. Last week, the US supreme court unanimously held that Congress acted within its constitutional rights to sever the link between TikTok and China.
The law permits the president to grant a single 90-day extension if he “makes certain certifications to Congress regarding progress toward a qualified divestiture”, to quote the court. Here, Trump issued a 75-day stay without real progress toward a sale.
Trump has come a long way. In 2020, he branded the app a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment. “The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” he declared in an executive order – which the court quoted verbatim.
Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and its parent and cozies up to China. Hours before his inauguration, he teased the possibility of converting TikTok into a joint venture between the US and the Middle Kingdom.
Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok, watched the inauguration alongside Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence. In case anyone forgot, this is the same Tulsi Gabbard who hung out in Syria with Bashar al-Assad, the country’s now deposed dictator.
Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee sounds incensed. “Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” he announced on Sunday.
“For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China.” Synchronously, Cotton’s forthcoming book is titled, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China.
For Trump, money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest. For starters, there is Jeff Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance. Coincidentally or not, Susquehanna was the largest institutional investor in Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, aka Truth Social, in late March.
Yass is also a key funder of the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed and libertarian-minded activist group. Trump met with him late last winter. Think convergence of interests.
Revenge on Mark Zuckerberg also likely weighed on Trump. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he posted to Truth Social in early March 2024. “They are a true Enemy of the People!”
On X, Elon Musk trumpeted the sentiment: “Trump’s statement there is correct.” These days, Zuckerberg bends the knee and sings from the Trump hymnal.
With a significant financial and physical presence in the PRC, Musk is disinclined to bite a hand that feeds him. In a recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla reported nearly $14.9bn in revenue from China in the first three-quarters of 2024.
Musk’s car company also disclosed: “In April 2024, one of our subsidiaries entered into a loan agreement … with lenders in China for an unsecured revolving facility of up to RMB 20.00bn.” That is approximately $2.72bn.
Shifting electoral demographics played a role too. “I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points,” Trump said at a mid-December press conference. “And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that.”
In reality, Trump actually lost the under-30 vote. Still, he did make serious inroads. Kamala Harris won younger Americans by 11%, a steep drop from Joe Biden’s 24-point margin in 2020. Beyond that, young men went Republican, 52-43, a group Biden carried, 52-41, just four years earlier – a jarring 20-point shift.
The latest polls show that a plurality of the US (46-26) and a majority of Republicans (60-18) support the ban, with younger voters opposed (41-29).
Minutes before the court published its decision, Trump announced that he had spoken with China’s Xi and TikTok was on the agenda. “It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together and starting immediately,” Trump posted to social media. “We discussed balancing Trade, Fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects.”
He concluded: “President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Han Zheng, vice-president of China, will be attending the inauguration.
The hits kept coming. “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture,” Trump posted on Sunday. Just think, Big Brother and state media would be wrapped into one nifty data-grabbing app! From the looks of things, Xi is rubbing off on Trump.
