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“President Donald Trump signed an executive order [last] Monday seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of a ban of popular short-video app TikTok that was slated to be shuttered on Jan. 19. While signing the order, Trump suggested the United States government should be a half owner of TikTok's U.S. business in return for keeping the app alive and warned that he could impose tariffs on China if Beijing failed to approve a U.S. deal with TikTok…
“But the legality of Trump's executive order is unclear. The law requiring the divestiture was passed by big majorities in Congress, signed by President Joe Biden, and upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court. The law also does not grant Trump authority to extend the deadline unless ByteDance has ‘binding agreements’ to sell TikTok and it is unclear [if] any agreements exist.” Reuters
Many on both sides are critical of Trump’s refusal to enforce the law:
“If you’re wondering how an executive order can override a law upheld by the nation’s highest court, you’re not alone… Laws now mean nothing if Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like them. It doesn’t matter that Congress passed the law. It doesn’t matter that the Supreme Court upheld that law. It doesn’t even matter that Trump himself was the impetus for the law. Trump changed his mind, and the whole of the world is forced to change with him.”
Lisa Needham, Public Notice
“President Trump took an oath to faithfully execute his office and preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. The chief executive’s solemn duty in our constitutional framework is, to state the obvious, to execute the laws faithfully. This means, in the absence of a good-faith belief that a law violates the Constitution (in particular, if the Supreme Court has not weighed in on the matter), the president must enforce Congress’s statutes…
“Yet, within mere hours of taking this oath, the president patently violated it by illegally granting the Communist Chinese regime and its agents — who are adversaries of the United States, regardless of whether this is a day of the week Trump chooses to see them as such — a reprieve from Congress’s duly enacted TikTok divestiture law… It is not acceptable for a president to refuse to enforce constitutional statutes, particularly those that are vital to national security.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
Other opinions below.
“In 2020, he branded the app a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment… Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and its parent and cozies up to China… For Trump, money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest…
“For starters, there is Jeff Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance. Coincidentally or not, Susquehanna was the largest institutional investor in Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with [Truth Social]…
“Revenge on Mark Zuckerberg also likely weighed on Trump. ‘If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,’ he posted to Truth Social in early March 2024… ‘I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture,’ Trump posted on Sunday. Just think, Big Brother and state media would be wrapped into one nifty data-grabbing app! From the looks of things, Xi is rubbing off on Trump.”
Lloyd Green, The Guardian
“If I were China’s minister of state security, I would be asking about any TikTok accounts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s four children. I’d also inquire about accounts of children of people across the government and military, looking to turn phones and laptops into microphones and cameras, as well as track locations, find blackmail material and locate still more targets. TikTok didn’t dispute the data collection in the Supreme Court case but claimed that it was ‘unlikely’ that China would force the company to hand over information…
“Really? Chinese companies are required by law to cooperate with State Security. Even foreign-owned companies have wilted under the pressure. Just ask Wang Xiaoning, a dissident whom China imprisoned for 10 years after Yahoo provided the government evidence linking him to emails and pro-democracy writings on Yahoo forums.”
Nicholas Kristof, New York Time
“The Obama administration repeatedly refused to enforce laws it disliked. When certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act proved controversial—such as the mandate that large employers provide insurance to their employees or else pay a penalty—the administration unilaterally delayed implementation. After Congress failed to enact relief for ‘Dreamers’—immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children—Mr. Obama protected them from deportation through executive action…
“Many local progressive prosecutors have openly suspended the enforcement of laws they oppose… Having embraced nonenforcement when they liked the results, progressives have little standing to complain when the Trump administration employs the same legal theory for different purposes. But while some conservatives may feel they should now follow progressives’ lead, doing so would forfeit the high ground.”
Zachary S. Price, Wall Street Journal
Some argue, “The real reason to ban TikTok shouldn’t be predicated on the concern of where the data goes but on what the app has done to its users. In a sense, TikTok (and knock-offs such as Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts) really do harvest user data to manipulate people in negative ways. Otherwise-healthy human beings are brought low by an addictive algorithm that hacks (figuratively) into their psyches and reduces them to anxious zombies with shorter attention spans than the average goldfish…
“Over time, the app severely stunts its users intellectually, socially, and emotionally. While some Americans have made their peace with turning their neighbors and their children into half-functional junkies, particularly those who profit from it politically or economically, such a product should alarm everyone else and inspire collective action. Threats to national security aside, apps like TikTok are bad for people and should therefore be banned or highly regulated.”
Auguste Meyrat, The Federalist
