By Noah Rothman
Monday, January 20, 2025
Among the first flurry of executive orders President
Donald Trump will sign after he takes the oath of office will be an edict
throwing the Chinese spyware app TikTok a lifeline. That’s right; after Trump
designates foreign drug cartels a foreign terrorist organization, declares a
national emergency at the border, and rolls back Joe Biden’s restrictions on
domestic energy exploration — all in the name of “national security” — Trump
will decline to enforce a measure designed to protect U.S. citizens from a hostile
foreign power.
It’s unclear if Trump even has this authority. Senator Tom
Cotton doesn’t seem to think he does, and TikTok risks “ruinous liability”
if it continues to operate outside the law. But the law is not a serious
consideration for either Trump or his outgoing Democratic predecessor.
We know TikTok is a threat to our national security
because everyone who is suddenly squeamish with a congressionally mandated ban
on the app unless it divested itself of Chinese Communist Party interests said
so. Congress asserted as much when it enacted the ban, and Joe Biden concurred when he signed it into law. Donald Trump had been saying as much for years, as had the
GOP-dominated House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The Supreme
Court’s justices determined
as much when they upheld the constitutionality of the ban. No one was
confused on that point until politics got in the way.
And because politics got in the way, now no one has the
spine to defend, much less enforce, their own policy. Biden has slunk away from his duty to enforce America’s duly
passed laws in the final minutes of his presidency, leaving it up to Donald
Trump to do what Biden wouldn’t — but only because he knew full well that
Trump, too, was all of a sudden disinclined to do his job; all and only because
a handful of gyrating teenagers, “content” creators, and the moneyed interests
who exploit their penchant for doing themselves reputational harm don’t like
it.
There is plenty of opprobrium to go around here. This has
been one of the most embarrassing and bipartisan displays of abject
spinelessness we’ve seen in quite a while. We cannot even say that Trump and
Biden are deferring to the interests of business at the expense of the market,
much less national security. That wouldn’t be especially remarkable, even if it
is lamentable. The stakeholders that refuse to divest themselves of TikTok in
the interest of its shareholders — preferring to shut the whole lucrative
enterprise down rather than allow it to flourish and generate capital — betrays
this Trojan Horse’s true nature. But all those prudential considerations have
to take a back seat now to the political demands of donors and a small but loud
cohort of excitable moppets.
It has been a sorry spectacle — one that is not justified
by any rationalization about the supposed “leverage” Trump is now wielding over
this instrument of Chinese statecraft. The law is the law, passed duly by
Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. As we wrote in today’s editorial, do your job, Mr. President.
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