Bill to remove TikTok from App Stores by end of September moves along hastily. Trump flip flops to oppose it.
Posted by
Qale (aka Qale)
Mar 11 '24, 19:16
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The 13-page bill is the product of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has served as an island of bipartisanship in the polarized House. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously last week to advance the legislation, which would remove TikTok from app stores in the United States by Sept. 30 unless its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, sold its stake.
But Mr. Trump, who as president issued an executive order that did exactly that, has now changed course and is vocally opposing the bill, a move that will test his ability to continue tanking bipartisan legislation in Congress from the campaign trail.
Mr. Trump on Monday offered a rambling explanation for his reversal, saying that he did not want to alienate young voters or imbue Facebook, which he considers a mortal foe, with more power.
In an interview on CNBC, Mr. Trump said that he still considered TikTok a national security threat, but that banning it would make young people “go crazy.” He added that any action harming the platform would benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Trump’s reversal on the issue will erode the bill’s broad base of support in the House, where a brewing fight over the legislation has grown tense. Many lawmakers were irate last week when TikTok dispatched its users to flood congressional telephone lines with calls beseeching members not to shut down the platform.
“Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok puts House Republicans in a very awkward position because it forces them to choose between supporting Trump or standing up to China,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist. “Voters on both sides of the aisle do not trust China to play by any meaningful set of rules and believe that China is determined to get away with whatever it can get away with, and that would apply to China’s control over TikTok.”
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