Vital stories sometimes simmer so long they’re easy to forget — so allow me to open with a thank-you to the editors of The Free Press for reminding me that President Donald Trump left the social malware app TikTok on the back burner. It’s time he dumped that hot mess into the sink.
The Western version of TikTok — which I’ve long called “social malware” — promotes social contagions, spotlighting aberrant behavior and conditioning young users to see it as normal. The Chinese version of TikTok serves its youthful audience a healthy diet of science, technology, math, history, life skills, patriotic themes, physical fitness, and the like.
That's why, late in his first term, Trump issued an executive order demanding that TikTok's Communist Chinese parent company, ByteDance — which has strong ties to the CCP — divest the platform or risk having it shut down.
At the time, Democrats were aghast, or at least pretended to be.
Once Democrats no longer needed TikTok as a cudgel against Trump, they decided it was a national security threat after all. Congress passed — and President Joe Biden's autopen signed — legislation last year banning the platform this year, if ByteDance can't find a Western buyer.
Just days before Trump 47 resumed office, SCOTUS upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The law gave ByteDance until January 19 (270 days from enactment) to find a buyer, but granted POTUS the power to grant a single, 90-day extension. Trump granted it, giving ByteDance until April 19. Then — and this was illegal — Trump granted another extension, giving ByteDance until June 19.
“Essentially with TikTok I have the right to sell it or close it,” Trump claimed when he issued the extension. "That’s wrong," the Free Press reminded readers this week. "Trump doesn’t have a right to sell or ban the app but an obligation."
Why won't Trump 47 enforce the law Trump 45 lobbied for?
My hypothesis is that Trump sees keeping TikTok's fate in limbo as leverage in the administration's ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing. If its best-in-class dopamine-jacking algorithm is included, TikTok’s estimated street value of $100–$200 million is no small amount of leverage.
I get it.
But my opinion is that there's more leverage to be gained from doing what the law requires and either shutting down TikTok's American operations or forcing the immediate sale to an American buyer. Since American buyers seem scarce — nothing came of Amazon's rumored bid in April, and no other buyers have appeared since — the law requires that TikTok be shut down.
Why?
Let's set the Wayback Machine to 1981 when the union representing the nation's air traffic controllers, PATCO, went on strike. The strike was illegal, and President Ronald Reagan warned he'd fire any striking ATC workers — and then he did. All 11,000 of them. It would be a decade before our ATC system fully recovered.
"The whole world was watching Reagan’s conduct during the strike," Stanley Kurtz noted 20 years ago. "This was obviously a man who would hang tough under pressure, and risk serious costs to back up a decision he believed to be necessary and right. The Soviets took note."
How a president conducts domestic policy deeply influences how overseas adversaries take his measure. Xi Jinping can count to $100 million — but a Reagan-esque demonstration of resolve? Priceless.
Mr. President, you asked for this TikTok law. Now it's time for you to enforce it.
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