Donald Trump didn’t even wait until his inauguration to precipitate his first constitutional crisis. Before he was even sworn in, he was already encouraging the major tech platforms to break the law.
In reality, Trump cannot magic away duly enacted statutes, by executive order or otherwise. The president has a constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” even if he really does intend to art-of-the-deal up some fantastic compromise that will make the coterie of billionaires that surrounds him even richer. And yet, after insisting that the Constitution’s Take Care clause required him to lean on Congress and state officials to “find” him votes, Trump will take the oath of office while openly exhorting companies to flout the law.
It would be astonishing if we hadn’t all lived through the past eight years.
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In August 2020, then-President Trump issued Executive Order 13942, purporting to ban ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, on the basis of “national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” Reportedly, he was pissed about a prank organized over TikTok in which people reserved blocks of tickets for his campaign rally in Tulsa with no intention of going, leading to hundreds of empty seats. (The thin crowd did not save Herman Cain, who caught covid and passed away shortly after.) Trump hoped to force a sale of the company to one of his billionaire buddies, perhaps Larry Ellison of Oracle, or a consortium led by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The Executive Order was blocked in multiple courts, but fearmongering about China is always a political winner on both sides of the aisle, and so in April of 2024, Congress passed and President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA). Unless TikTok was sold to a non-Chinese company within 270 days, the app would be forced to shut down on January 19, 2025.
The putative aim of the law was to protect Americans from manipulation and data collection by China. After an expedited appeal to the Supreme Court challenging the law on First Amendment grounds, the justices issued a unanimous opinion on Friday, January 17 allowing PAFACA to go into effect. The Court held that Congress had identified at least one “important” governmental interest — “preventing China from collecting the personal data of tens of millions of U.S. TikTok users” — sufficient to justify burdening the speech of Americans who use the app.
And that is why TikTok went dark at about 10pm EST on Saturday night, and why it remains unavailable to download as of this writing.
Meanwhile in MAGAworld …
After starting this kerfuffle four years ago, Trump had a change of heart in 2024. Indeed, his campaign relied heavily on the platform and had major success there. (To be fair, the Biden and Harris campaigns used the platform as well, although less successfully.) So even after his own party voted overwhelmingly to ban it in March, Trump promised to be the savior of the app he’d once condemned.
“The other side’s closing it up. But I’m now a big star on TikTok,” he burbled in September. “We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s gonna close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump. If you don’t care about TikTok and other things like safety, security, and prosperity, then you can vote for a Marxist who’s going to destroy our country.”
After the election, Trump credited the app with his win: “You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points and there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it.” (Harris won 54 percent of voters under 30.)
Understanding that the US had just sent a wannabe despot back to the White House, TikTok CEO Shou Chew made a beeline for Mar-a-Lago. According to the New York Times, Chew threw himself at the dictator’s feet, telling “people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, and possibly the president-elect himself, that Mr. Trump should be the one to decide TikTok’s fate.” And for his prostrations, he’ll be rewarded with a seat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration along with tech titans Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg — a living testament to the president’s godlike power. TikTok even sponsored “an inauguration party honoring influencers who helped Donald Trump spread his campaign message.”
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