Why Trump's Backtrack on the TikTok Ban is Deadly to Democracy

With TikTok, he is bowing to president Xi. With Ukraine, he is bowing to President Putin. And in both cases, he and the GOP are bowing to big money…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Donald Trump’s flip-flop yesterday on TikTok shows how corrupt and sold out he and the rest of the GOP have become.

With TikTok, he is bowing to president Xi. With Ukraine, he is bowing to President Putin. And in both cases, he and the GOP are bowing to big money.

Reagan’s Republican Party was committed to making the world safe for democracy; today the only force arguing for actual democracy in the United States and overseas is the Democratic Party.

How did it come to this?

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that Donald Trump is for sale. What’s shocking, though, is that the Republican Party — once America’s proud bastion of anti-authoritarianism (see: Cuba, Venezuela, East Germany, the USSR) is now also fully for sale to the highest dictatorial bidder.

The most recent case-in-point is TikTok, widely acknowledged as part of a worldwide influence operation loyal to Chinese Communist dictator Xi.

Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously — 50 to 0 — to require TikTok’s Chinese government-affiliated owner, ByteDance, to sell the social media company to an entity not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party if they want to continue to have the app available in the US.

For American users of TikTok, the only difference would be that posts criticizing China would no longer be suppressed by the algorithm. Pets and friends and everything else would stay the same.

Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA) was explicit:

“It is very important that it is targeted and specific to the national security threat. This is not related to content. This is about the threat because of the data that has been collected.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R–LA) was blunt, according to yesterday’s New York Times:

“We must ensure the Chinese government cannot weaponize TikTok against American users and our government through data collection and propaganda.”

Even “Moscow Mike Johnson,” the Christian White Nationalist Speaker of the House who is actively holding up Ukraine aid to please Putin and Trump, was on board with the effort, saying it is:

“[A]n important bipartisan measure to take on China, our largest geopolitical foe, which is actively undermining our economy and security.”

TikTok, for their part, has gone on the offensive, pushing a message to all 170 million US users over 18 to tell Congress to stop the “TikTok ban.” What’s proposed, of course, is not a ban at all; it’s simply a demand that a company not affilliated with the Chinese government take over ownership of TikTok.

This lie is a stark example of the political power TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party can weild: Congress has been overwhelmed with calls from TikTok users, many of them teenagers, demanding there be “no ban of TikTok.”

There are multiple concerns about the widespread use of TikTok in the United States.

The company was outed by The New York Times for spying on journalists; The Wall Street Journal noted that the “Video-sharing app says it has walled off American data, but employees say data is still sometimes shared with its China-based parent”; and their algorithm appears to be heavily slanted toward pro-China (and against anti-China) propaganda.

As one of the top research groups on internet propaganda, working with Rutgers University, reported:

“The Network Contagion Research Institute analyzed hashtag ratios between Instagram and TikTok across topics sensitive to the Chinese Government.

“While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1).”

President Joe Biden called the forced divestiture legislation “an important and welcome step,” adding that he would promptly sign the bill when it passes Congress.

And Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) laid out the stakes while noting the millions ByteDance is spending to lobby members of Congress against separating TikTok from their Chinese Communist Party overlords:

“Today, it’s about our bill and it’s about intimidating members considering that bill. But tomorrow, it could be misinformation or lies about an election, about a war, about any number of things.”

As Alex Hern, Technology Editor for The Guardian, exposed back in 2019:

“TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.

“The documents, revealed by the Guardian for the first time, lay out how ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered technology company that owns TikTok, is advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.”

As Noah Smith notes on his excellent Substack newsletter, Noahpinion:

“So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid.

“Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary — along with TSMC, the freedom of 23 million people, and the confidence and respect of the world.”

It could be, in other words, very much like the anti-Ukraine propaganda campaign the Russian government is currently running on both Facebook and X. That has been so successful that congressional Republicans are cowering before it.

Social media companies are awesomely powerful, and very much not as committed to democracy as they are to making money, American national interests be damned. As Rana Foroohar noted in yesterday’s subscriber newsletter from The Financial Times:

“Remember Mark Zuckerberg and friends sitting in front of Congress telling senators how they should be America’s national champions, and then finding out soon after that Facebook had partnered with a bunch of Chinese firms that the US considered security threats? Or how about companies like Apple kowtowing to Beijing with special data standards for the Chinese market? Then there’s the way in which any number of firms, like Google or Microsoft, collect data and in some cases send it to Russian or Chinese companies. National champions? I don’t think so.”

And with TikTok being beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, the stakes for the survival of democracy here and around the world are exponentially higher.

For his part, Trump has been pushing something very much like Congress’s proposed forced separation of TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party ever since he became president in 2017.

At least he was. Until a billionaire holding a 15% stake in TikTok — an estimated $21 billion — visited Mar-a-Lago a few days ago.

Yesterday’s New York Times, in an article titled “Trump Gives Rambling Answer on Why He Backtracked on a TikTok Ban,” reveals how after that meeting Trump changed his mind. The opening paragraph is stark:

“Former President Donald J. Trump offered a rambling and confusing explanation on Monday of why he had reversed himself on whether the United States should ban TikTok over concerns that its Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.”

In other words, Trump just decided to sell out America. And he’s demanding Congressional Republicans bow to his wishes.

What brought about this sudden change that risks US national security?

Trump recently got a Swiss-based insurance company whose CEO has ties to Putin to cover the $91 million bond he needed to appeal his E. Jean Carroll rape and defamation judgement. The co-signer is still unknown; it could even be Putin, for all we know, but we know for sure that, lacking a bizarre sweetheart deal, Trump doesn’t have enough fully liquid assets to be able to get such a bond without help.

But he’s still on the hook for a nearly half-billion-dollar judgment for his years of committing business, insurance, and tax fraud against New York State.

Thus, apparently, this visitor to Mar-a-Lago, who’s mind-bogglingly rich, was able to convince Trump that America’s security should be just as irrelevant as our commitment to democracy in Ukraine and Europe. TikTok’s profits are the only thing that matters to Trump now.

Will his next bail bondsman be affiliated with the Chinese government that was so generous in giving millions in trademarks to Trump’s daughter? Will Trump sell out Taiwan — and risk World War III — for a pile of cash?

Or is he finally getting around to selling the top secret documents we just learned this week that he flew to Bedminster and have not yet been recovered by the FBI?

Stay tuned…