What is Trump’s game with TikTok? | Lloyd Green
What is Trump’s game with TikTok? | Lloyd Green
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This is what crony capitalism looks like. Trump’s delay contravenes the law Congress passed last spring. 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.
