President Trump on Friday touted his TikTok deal with China’s leader Xi Jinping as yet another example of his business savvy working wonders for the American people.
The truth is more complicated.
The wildly popular, Chinese-owned app that provides addictive short videos is a huge moneymaker, and now will be “saved” from a law that bans it in the US.
As reported this past week and confirmed on Friday, it will be owned by a US company to safeguard user data and make sure the world’s largest surveillance state isn’t using it as a spycraft portal.
A win-win, right?
Not quite.
Trump is all about the “Art of the Deal,” and there’s lots to like about his business savvy, whether it’s prodding corporate America to bring manufacturing back home from Asia or forcing Europe to start paying up for defense.
Most of the time, on key issues like tariffs, he knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. He cut deals on his onerous “Liberation Day” levies and stocks have soared.
And with TikTok, he’s reportedly negotiating a multibillion-dollar fee for the US government to broker the deal.
Yet when you parse what else we know about his “framework” with Xi over the future of the app, it’s hard to find art here.
Instead, Trump has allowed his own fixations to blind him to the reality that TikTok isn’t worth saving.
There are many reasons why TikTok should be shut down in the US, despite its popularity particularly with younger Americans who make up a huge swath of its 170 million users.
Oddly, the president used to be pretty good at articulating those reasons.
The old Trump, during his first term, saw it as a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party not only to spy on Americans but also rot their brains.
Anti-US propaganda
Cute dance videos?
Your kid’s TikTok feed is littered with anti-American propaganda and glorification of transgenderism (which after the assassination of Charlie Kirk has in some cases turned into a death cult).
It’s rife with agitprop that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is part of an axis of evil with the US.
Following the Oct. 7 massacre, TikTok overflowed with antisemitic hatred that spilled onto our college campuses.
The app’s Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, argued that such worries were overblown and the spycraft charges unfounded.
Hard evidence suggested otherwise.
Members of both parties passed a law banning the app from the US unless it totally disengaged with the Chinese.
The company sued on First Amendment grounds and lost before the Supreme Court, which ruled that a nation has a right to defend itself against foreign adversaries like the CCP.
Against this backdrop, Trump went from a hater to lover of TikTok.
Keep in mind that if you know Trump, you know he doesn’t think in years, but in nanoseconds, so-called short-termism where you are graded in the last quarterly earnings report and every day by virtue of your stock price.
Snaring the youth vote
When Trump mounted his presidential comeback, he saw that TikTok could be useful in getting out the youth vote; flood it with pro-American, pro-Trump content and maybe the kids will turn MAGA.
In 2024 more kids did turn MAGA than ever before, and Trump attributed a lot of it to TikTok, I am told.
He wants to use it to help his successor in 2028, and has been issuing executive orders to override the ban ever since.
In reality, he’s giving this thing way too much credit for what Kirk, with his campus voter outreach, accomplished before he was senselessly murdered doing just that.
Trump, meanwhile, says he’s got TikTok in a place that it will do nothing but good for the MAGA cause. It will be largely owned by US investors.
Many had stakes in ByteDance that they will roll into the new company worth an estimated $50 billion.
It could IPO at some point.
Yes, there will be lots of fat-cat money to be made, certainly enough that it blinds them to what is really happening.
The company might be US majority-owned, but its all-important algorithm — the secret sauce that feeds videos based on user preferences that had supported the Chinese propaganda and spying aims — is China’s.
I hear Xi is allowing Oracle — which will house TikTok’s user data in its cloud — to let the new company to change the algo and remove anything nefarious.
How long that will take is anyone’s guess, and it might never happen, according to some sources involved in the deal machinations.
Meanwhile CCP propaganda and a lot more will continue to pollute American minds, when there’s a simple solution to all of this: Let TikTok go dark.
Let’s not save something that just ain’t worth saving.
