Former President Donald Trump has shown he is not going to fight for conservatives if he ends up getting reelected. His second term would be all about selling out.
This is the chief takeaway from Trump flip-flopping on TikTok. He had previously (correctly) pushed to ban the app for being Chinese spyware, which it clearly is. He pursued an executive order that would ban TikTok unless the Chinese company that owns it, ByteDance, sells the app to a company that does not have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Now that Congress is again considering a bill that would do exactly that, Trump has changed his tune. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, to do better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Is the sudden change of heart truly the result of a moronic calculation that Facebook will “double” its business and that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worse than the CCP? Perhaps. But, coincidentally, Trump’s flip-flop also comes just one week after GOP billionaire donor Jeff Yass visited Mar-a-Lago. Yass is reportedly threatening GOP legislators with pulling his funding from them if they push forward with their bill, which Yass denies, for what that is worth.
Why is this? Yass personally owns a 7% stake in ByteDance worth around $21 billion. His investment firm bought a 15% stake in ByteDance in 2012.
According to @politicoalex, about a week ago Trump patched things up with Jeff Yass a major Club for Growth donor and a TikTok investor.
Then yesterday with no warning Trump came out in favor of continued PRC ownership of TikTok.
https://t.co/TZ3W1VrzVi
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 8, 2024
This would be the second time that Trump is selling out for donors, after he told conservatives to back off Bud Light over the brand partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and insulting women in the process. As the Washington Examiner reported at the time, “Trump’s call for his supporters to hop back on the Bud Light train came the same day Jeff Miller, a lobbyist who has been hired by Anheuser-Busch, announced the hosting of a fundraiser for Trump next month.”
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Just chock full of coincidences these reversals are, aren’t they?
We know Trump has been burning through campaign funds, and we know he has already turned on other conservative positions, such as making pro-lifers into scapegoats for him and his failing candidates. Now we know that Trump is reversing himself on positions conveniently timing with visits with donors or with fundraiser announcements. Despite all his tough talk, he didn’t actually have the stomach to fight the “deep state” during his presidency, and now he is signaling that he will be a sellout if he gets a lame-duck second term.