At one time toward the end of his presidency, Donald Trump’s administration pushed for the sale of TikTok out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Trump, at the time, was wholly correct in his desire to do so – the problems with the app and how it subverts American interests and American youth are well-documented.
But Trump appears to have flipped his position, and has recently been attacking attempts to “ban” TikTok as something meant to empower Facebook, a social media app he has a grudge against.
READ MORE: As a Nationwide Ban Looms, Trump Must Not Go Soft on TikTok (OPINION)
In truth, the policy of going after TikTok’s parent company to force them to sell isn’t a ban of the app outright. All ByteDance needs to do is divest itself of TikTok. If it sells the app, it remains on the market in the U.S.
But the Chinese government says they will forbid that from happening, which would lead to it being blocked in the U.S. There are ways around that kind of a block, mind you, and the influencers (and American kids all over) will find that out soon enough.
But Trump may have given away an ulterior motive in recent comments about the policy move.
In a recent post on his Truth Social page (that was subsequently crossed to Twitter), Trump warned all voters, but “especially the young people” that Biden wanted to ban TikTok.
Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok. He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) April 22, 2024
This might be where Trump is actually trolling Joe Biden a bit. There are some who will immediately jump out and say “THIS WAS HIS PLAN ALL ALONG,” and there are some who will say “He got lucky (again).” Here’s what’s happening, though, and I’ll let you determine which is which.
If Trump is poking at Biden, he is doing one of two things. The first is that he could simply be mocking Biden for losing young voters, as some recent polling suggests he is. If those young voters decide to stay home instead of supporting Biden in November, then awesome.
Or, he could be planning to force the Biden team to react and switch their position on TikTok, to which Republicans (and some Democrats) will turn on Biden for bowing down to the Chinese. And Trump, as a strong God King of America, would never do such a thing.
I imagine the former is more likely, but the second could be a happy accident if it were to happen. As we know all too well, Biden loves to base his policy positions on how voters might react to it (or do react to it in polling), so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Whatever Trump is doing, I hope he ultimately understands that TikTok’s owners (ByteDance) and overlords (the CCP) do not have “the young people’s” best interest at heart. And I hope he takes some sort of action if Biden doesn’t. TikTok is a fun app, sure, but it’s also actively working against us as a nation, and that has to be addressed.
