Explaining in Five Paragraphs the Scam Donald Trump Just Pulled on 150 Million American TikTok Users
Make no mistake, one of the most popular apps in the world was just down in the U.S. for 14 hours because Donald Trump ordered that it be taken down. Why? So he could be seen as a hero in “saving” it.
Earlier this week, following a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal law went into effect that required that the popular social media app TikTok be taken down in the United States. President Joe Biden immediately indicated that he would leave to the discretion of his successor in that office, Donald Trump, whether the statutorily permitted 90-day extension of TikTok’s ability to remain operative in the U.S. would be enacted (as the law that banned TikTok also said that evidence of an active and fruitful search for a U.S. buyer for the Chinese-owned company could earn the site a stay of execution, so in theory there was a determination yet to be made by an elected official on that score before any ban could be postponed). One hiccup in all this was that Donald Trump wasn’t yet President of the United States at the time the ban went into effect, and therefore didn’t technically have the authority to issue—or reject—the 90-day ban extension, the latter the course of action apparently urged on him by his co-president Elon Musk, who made clear in a tweet on his Twitter platform that he doesn’t think TikTok (a competitor of Twitter) should be legal in the United States so long as his own platform isn’t legal in China.
It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump has consistently and aggressively been in favor of banning TikTok, changing his mind only during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign and only when it seemed he might lose the election and after a billionaire megadonor convinced him (apparently) of a cause 150 million average Americans couldn’t; indeed, as you can see below, it was Donald Trump who in 2020 single-handedly launched the effort to kill TikTok that’s now reached fruition. So his commitment to keeping TikTok alive is far from clear, to say the least; on the one hand, he and Musk are regarded by many as grave national security threats due to their conflicts of interest in China—which leave them amenable to almost anything the Chinese Communist Party wants, whether or not it’s good for the United States—but on the other hand, banning TikTok is now a bipartisan position in Congress and Trump has promised his MAGA faithful that he’ll be tough on China. So no one really knows what Trump will do, especially as nothing he says can actually be believed.
With all this in mind, one of two things had to be the case going into this weekend: either Joe Biden had delegated to Donald Trump the decision on whether to enact a federal extension on TikTok even in lieu of Trump having presidential authority, in which case if Trump really wanted the app to stay live all this weekend it would have, or else President Biden didn’t delegate that authority to Trump, in which case under federal law the app had to remain shuttered until noon on Monday (when Trump will be sworn in as the next President of the United States, inches away from co-POTUS Elon Musk).
What actually happened is that—as you can see from the images below—TikTok first shuttered itself in accordance with the new federal law, then (presumably because of a backchannel communication from or with Team Trump) almost immediately thereafter changed its main-page message to locked-out users to a note that lauded Trump for promising to save TikTok. Then, 14 hours later, the platform went live again under a new message that offered fawning credit to Trump at a time when Trump has invited the TikTok CEO to his inauguration and received positively gobs of money from a donor closely linked to it. All this created an unavoidable impression of a hoax or scam in which (a) Trump is really just pumping his megadonors for cash behind the scenes as he also (b) could have insured TikTok stayed live all weekend but wanted it down for a period of time so that the 150 million Americans who use TikTok would suffer from a sense of loss and grief just long enough to feel lasting gratitude to Trump for “saving” an app in fact he himself had taken offline (and perhaps so megadonors would open their pockets a little wider to ensure their investment remained healthy). Further evidence that this is all a scam or hoax that has to do with Donald Trump’s particular relationship with TikTok is that all other Byte Dance apps (e.g., CapCut and Lemon8) are still banned, and none (including TikTok) are available in the Google or Apple app stores—confirming that the reinstatement tonight was some sort of sub rosa political arrangement that indeed flies in the face of federal law. That is, an exception has been made so a one-off political stunt could be pulled.
Never before in American history has a U.S. president spent the 48 hours before he takes office (1) executing a vile memecoin scam, then (2) scamming and deliberately traumatizing 150+ million Americans out of a service they rely on simply to create for himself a political “win.” This sort of dodgy conduct is a pretty good indication that—as nonpartisan historians held to be the case after the first Trump Administration—the second Trump Administration will also be accounted the worst in U.S. history. It’s no wonder that a meme is now going around referring to TikTok in the Trump era as “TrikTok.” Users have no way of knowing whether it (a) is back to stay; (b) will instead be pulled out from under them again for political purposes like Lucy (of Peanuts fame) pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just before he kicks it; (c) will come back, but only a long time from now, after Musk has extracted the concessions he is now demanding from the CCP; or (d) will come back but only under an owner Trump has handpicked—he says he’s demanded 50% U.S. ownership of TikTok—in which case the platform might be quickly MAGA-fied and “enshittified” as Musk did to Twitter.
Coda: Additional Memes
And a headline that’s going around with respect to Trump’s preposterous memecoin:
You can’t trust anything Trump does &, in fact, he will undermine the American ppl every chance he gets.😡
What a shit show we are heading into. Rick Wilson was never more accurate when he said the everything Trump touches dies. I just never imagined we would be living through this twice. I hope that we have the fight to survive his corruption a second time.