Former President Donald Trump has blatantly flip-flopped on TikTok and China. As president, Trump ordered that TikTok find an American owner or be “shut down” in the United States. Now, he says banning TikTok would be a grave mistake.
President Trump was right back then, and former President Trump is wrong today. As my colleague Tom Rogan explained, the communist Chinese government requires loyalty from ByteDance, and there’s every reason to believe that all data gathered by TikTok become the property of the People’s Republic of China. There’s plenty of evil the communist dictatorship can do with the data.
So why would Trump flip-flop? Many Trump critics aptly point out that Trump has recently grown close to a conservative billionaire with whom he was recently on bad terms: Jeff Yass, who has a $33 billion stake in ByteDance. The New York Post recently reported that Yass has threatened to cut off donations to Republicans who try and force ByteDance to sell TikTok.
The simplest and most cynical explanation here is that Trump is basically being bribed by Yass.
I think that’s wrong — and so do other commentators.
Jonathan Chait at New York magazine offers his explanation: TikTok leftism is focused on attacking President Joe Biden as too friendly to Israel, and so Trump sees an advantage in that.
Peter Kafka at Business Insider has a different account:
“Back in 2020, Trump didn’t care about TikTok, at all. It was on his radar for a minute, and when he realized that talking about banning it would generate a lot of attention, he made more noises about banning it. Then eventually, his administration wrote an executive order, and … never really followed through with anything.”
I offer yet another explanation, and it requires setting aside two stereotypes about Trump: (1) that he is stubborn and (2) that he is always lying.
Instead, these two facts are true, I believe:
- Trump is the most impressionable president of all time. He is very easy to persuade if he likes you.
- He is telling the truth today when he explains why he is defending TikTok.
Here’s Trump’s argument for letting TikTok continue to operate in the U.S. under communist Chinese control:
That sounds impossibly petty for a man who would be president, but I think it’s his honest motivation. Twitter, now X, and Facebook booted Trump off their platforms amid political outcry after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. They also tried their hardest to prevent readers from learning negative stuff about Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling operation in the days before the 2020 election.
Trump hates Facebook for those reasons, and that’s all that matters to him. So, we should take Trump at his word.
Also, I think that this is a story of D.C. money-in-politics influence peddling. Yass and Kellyanne Conway both likely lobbied him and made exactly the above point: Banning TikTok helps Facebook, and that hurts you. I don’t think they had to bribe him, but I think he really respects Conway and has legitimately come around on Yass — now that Yass supports him.
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If you act like you like Trump, he will listen to you, and you can probably change his mind. This is not a good trait in a president. I’ve written before about bad decisions Trump has made because the last person he spoke with was either a motivated special interest or just plain wrong.
This isn’t a defense of Trump, of course, but I think it’s wrong to assume he was bribed. Instead, he was bamboozled.