One of President Donald Trump’s biggest abuses of power remains how he ignored a law signed by Congress to get a deal on TikTok. The result is a deal that does not even meet the standards that Congress set out in the first place.
TikTok on Thursday announced that its U.S. operations would be controlled by a group of American investors. The managing investors will be MGX, Oracle, and Silver Lake, with Oracle providing the data security. This is being hailed as some kind of victory, even with the Chinese company ByteDance still holding about a 20% stake in the operation.
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That is not the clean break that was required by the law that Congress passed. ByteDance’s involvement with TikTok is what brought the law on in the first place, as ByteDance works closely with the Chinese Communist Party and has been caught circumventing app store protections put in place by Apple and Google. Trump’s deal does not require TikTok to divest from ByteDance, which defeats the whole purpose of the law.
But this matches how Trump has handled this from the beginning. Trump issued multiple pauses on the enforcement of the law by executive order, extensions that were not permitted under the law as written. That law was passed by Congress and signed by the president, and Trump simply ignored it for over a year to get a deal he wanted to keep TikTok running. He bought into ByteDance’s threats to shut down the app, and he folded.
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It remains, arguably, his biggest abuse of power in his five years in the White House, but no one cares. Republicans don’t care because if Trump likes TikTok, they will at least tolerate it. Democrats don’t care because they love TikTok; it was a miracle they even voted in favor of this law in the first place. That means Congress is happy to ignore that Trump treated them like an advisory council rather than the legislative branch of the American federal government.
This is a failure. It is a reminder that Trump is weak on China. Worst of all, it is a clear-cut abuse of power and violation of the law, the kind of thing Democrats screech about every time Trump opens his mouth and Republicans would foam at the mouth over if it had been done by a Democrat. Yet, no one with any discernible political power seems to care.