The TikTok Rout

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

America’s pitiful struggle to rid itself of a Chinese propaganda op was predictable in every way—save one.

 

This time, Congress did its job. It did so boldly, with huge bipartisan majorities, despite the real risk of a backlash from constituents. It’s so unusual to see the legislature act aggressively to protect the national interest instead of deferring to another branch that I struggle to think of other recent examples. A body that nowadays mostly exists to rubber-stamp spending bloat 10 minutes before a government shutdown takes effect showed leadership for once.

 

But it almost certainly won’t matter. Every other major player in this saga is reluctant to follow suit, predictably.

 

It was predictable that Democrats would get cold feet about banning TikTok. They’re shellshocked by the fact that they keep losing popularity contests to a boorish felon and plainly don’t want to do anything that might further alienate the public. So party leaders in the Senate have begun looking for a way to delay the ban, with Sen. Chuck Schumer reduced to babbling about not wanting to inconvenience “so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers” on the platform.

 

On Thursday evening the White House solved their problem for them temporarily. Joe Biden announced that he won’t enforce the ban when it takes effect on Sunday, his last full day in office, leaving the matter to Donald Trump’s administration even though it was Biden himself who signed it into law. (In a ruling Friday, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the ban.) Last I checked, the president’s duty to execute federal statutes isn’t optional—but then, not enforcing laws is a Biden specialty. So his punt was also predictable, right down to how it reinforces the sense that Trump, not Biden, has been calling the shots on U.S. policy since November 5.

 

The new president has also evolved predictably on TikTok.

 

Trump was ahead of Congress in perceiving the threat when he moved to ban the app by executive order during his first term. But you know him: Flattery—and money—will get you everywhere. He’s very excited about how popular he’s become on the platform, declaring that China’s spy app now occupies a “warm spot in [his] heart” and posting data about his huge following there earlier this month under the question, “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Forced to choose between national security and his own vanity, it’s no contest. 

 

And if that weren’t reason enough for him to reconsider his position, making rich friends with financial interests in TikTok probably would be.

 

Senate Democrats were mystified on Thursday to learn that TikTok’s CEO will enjoy a “position of honor” at Monday’s inauguration but I don’t think it’s hard to understand. Trump is collecting tech titans like Pokemon cards, knowing that they’re the gatekeepers of information in modern America and therefore uniquely positioned to help him shape public opinion on all sorts of things. He doesn’t want to ban TikTok; he wants to exploit it, I’m sure, and having the Chinese government and its CEO mouthpiece owe him a favor for saving their pipeline to young America will serve that interest.

 

It’s unclear exactly how Trump will do it, but you wouldn’t invite the head of a company to celebrate your coronation if you were about to turn around and nuke his enterprise, would you?

 

All of this was predictable. The reaction of the American public was predictable too.

 

The public shifts.

 

Did you know that banning TikTok is less popular now than it was two years ago?

 

It’s true. A Pew Research poll found support for the ban dropping from 50-22 in March 2023 to 32-28 in August 2024. That decline was bipartisan, shifting from 60 percent support among Republicans and 43 percent among Democrats to 42 and 24 percent, respectively. And if you’re thinking that TikTok users must have driven the change in opinion, think again: Support for the ban sank more steeply among Americans who don’t use the platform than among those who do.

 

It is remarkable that Americans have become less willing to ban an instrument of Chinese propaganda as they’ve grown more aware of the risks it poses. Again, Trump had the app in his crosshairs as far back as 2020; four years later, Congress came together across party lines to bring down the hammer. It’s not as if the public hasn’t heard the arguments against TikTok or been given time to consider them.

 

We can’t blame Trump’s turnabout for their shift either. Republican support for the ban had already dropped 10 points by October 2023, before he had his change of heart, and continued to decline despite the fact that MAGA-friendly Republicans like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz have cheered for a ban steadfastly. The “Trump effect” on left-wing opinion is missing as well: Instead of rallying behind the ban after Trump opposed it, Democratic support dropped another 5 points between October 2023 and August 2024.

 

Most remarkable of all is that TikTok has gone out of its way to confirm that its “business” isn’t really about business. As others have noted, a venture that’s primarily interested in making money wouldn’t doggedly resist a law requiring it to sell its holdings to an American firm. It would comply, cash out, and make a bundle. That ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, has refused so persistently suggests its interest in the American market isn’t about profit. It’s about influence.

 

As if to prove the point, the company is now vowing to shut down TikTok’s operations altogether when the ban takes effect on Sunday—even though the law doesn’t require it to. The “ban” forces digital storefronts, like app stores, to make it unavailable for download or face steep fines; users who’ve already downloaded it are free to continue using it (although, since the app could no longer be updated, usability would gradually decline). A normal business wouldn’t cut off its revenue stream by “going dark” a moment sooner than it absolutely had to. But that’s what TikTok apparently intends to do, hoping to maximize the rage its users feel toward the U.S. government by cutting them off suddenly, and needlessly, from their daily dopamine drip.

 

What kind of “business” prioritizes its ability to sway opinion over its ability to make money?

 

A failure of will.

 

You can explain the pro-TikTok trend in public opinion as cynically as you like. Maybe more Americans have sequestered themselves in postliberal propaganda bubbles over time, altering the “news” they’ve been getting about the platform. Or maybe they’ve heard the arguments against TikTok and decided that they simply don’t care if it’s as bad as its critics say. They’re having too much fun watching make-up tutorials or whatever to worry when they’re offered a clip about how the Uyghurs are enemies of humanity.

 

I lean toward that theory since it jibes with how Trump won reelection. Who cares about authoritarianism, here or abroad, so long as eggs are cheap and the algorithm keeps cranking out content you enjoy?

 

There’s a third, even grimmer possibility for the backlash to the ban, though. The very fact that the U.S. government has rallied behind it might be turning Americans against it. We may have reached the point of diminished public faith in institutions that seeing Uncle Sam get tough with the Chinese Communist Party is reason enough for many to give the CCP a second look.

 

Actually, “may” is the wrong word. We have reached that point. A different Chinese social media app—Xiaohongshu, which translated means “Little Red Book,” of all things—has skyrocketed in popularity because disgruntled TikTokkers have decided it’s more important to spite their own elected officials by using Chinese tech than to deprive one of the planet’s most sinister regimes from influencing Western opinion.

 

Some of the rationalizations from leftist imbeciles who’ve made the switch, insisting that China is no more nefarious than the United States and by some measures is considerably less, need to be seen to be believed. Jonathan Last summarized the state of American politics on the eve of Trump’s inauguration this way: “Our decadence has grown so fat and wobbly that one part of the country is now choosing soft authoritarianism at home while another group is too dim to understand the differences between liberalism and authoritarianism.”

 

I don’t know what else to call all of this except a terrifying rout for China and its propaganda operations, portending many more to come as conflict between our two nations develops. The outgoing U.S. president can’t summon the will to enforce the law; the incoming president can’t decide if letting China brainwash his youngest constituents will be good or bad for him; the people themselves are too dissolute from years of social-media lotus-eating to care whether the United States or China rules the world.

 

It’s more evidence, in case more was needed, that Americans have passed the stage of decadence in which they’re merely unserious about solving their problems and entered the stage of outright fantasy to cope with them. Federal spending is another familiar example: Tea Party-era warnings about a crisis driven by unsustainable entitlements haven’t just gone unheeded, they’ve led to an American right that palpably doesn’t care and despises fiscal conservatives like former Speaker Paul Ryan who do. Somehow we’re further away from reckoning seriously with our debt than we were 15 years ago even though we’re many trillions of dollars deeper in the hole.

 

We can’t even muster a consensus to oust a totalitarian menace from our information diet by enforcing a law that’s already on the books. It’s hard to believe we’ll ever be a serious country again.

 

Frenemies.

 

One of my hottest takes about Trump’s second term is that his relations with China will be much warmer than anyone expects.

 

But that take isn’t all that hot, really. Despite his loud-and-proud nationalism and reputation for pugnacity toward Beijing, Trump has never been as hostile to China as he’s cracked up to be. Never once that I can remember has he taken great exception to the sort of things normal Americans fear and loathe about the Chinese Communist Party. On the contrary: According to John Bolton, his former national security adviser, he once told Xi Jinping to his face that he should go ahead with building concentration camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

 

He doesn’t hide his admiration for China’s totalitarian “strength.” He doesn’t seem to care much either whether they menace their neighbors, instead treating U.S. alliances in the region as a “money machine” in which America’s continued presence is less a matter of containing a malign superpower than conducting a protection racket.

 

His grievance with China has always been about trade. And even there, if you pay close attention you’ll find him hurriedly backpedaling from his threats on the campaign trial. National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted today that Trump went from threatening tariffs of 60 percent—or more—against Beijing in an interview early last year to threatening tariffs of 10 percent after the election if the regime doesn’t do more to crack down on the fentanyl trade.

 

I doubt they’re worried. By some measures they won the trade war with the U.S. during Trump’s first term, capitalizing on it to grow their influence in Mexico and Latin America. But they should want to play ball with him this time, I think: If they can accommodate him somehow on his pet issue, handing him a nominal victory on trade that he can brandish to America-First-ers, I expect they’ll find him surprisingly agreeable on all sorts of other priorities, like Taiwan—and TikTok.

 

As it happens, he held a phone call with Xi just this morning and sounded … pretty darned agreeable afterward about their conversation.

 

I doubt seriously that Trump is committed to containing China. (And I’m not the only one!) He always and ever only wants to get paid and he’s all but certain to impose that ethos on U.S. diplomacy starting Monday, in case his “money machine” comment about South Korea wasn’t clear enough. The closest thing Trumpism has to a principle is that you should bully everyone whom you can get away with bullying and befriend everyone whom you can’t. He’s perfectly willing to be China’s friend. Just pay him.

 

He’ll figure out a way to let TikTok off the hook, even if it means violating his oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. (The law allows the president to postpone the ban for 90 days but ByteDance plainly hasn’t met the statutory conditions for that yet, in case anyone still cares about such things.) All Beijing needs to do is figure out a way to pay him. 

 

That might have been a problem for him if he were surrounded this time by the same cadre of old-school hawks that filled out his Cabinet eight years ago. In that case I’d say that China was destined to witness the same schizophrenic behavior that Russia did in his first term, with the authoritarian Trump eagerly courting his foreign counterpart as a kindred spirit while his Reaganite advisers went about pushing policies on him that increased tensions between the two sides. A darkly comic example from Trump 1.0 did involve China, in fact: On the very day in 2020 that Bolton exposed Trump’s support for Uyghur concentration camps, the then-president signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020.

 

But this time will be different. The Reaganites have either been excommunicated or brought to heel. Trump, having won the popular vote a few months ago, commands his party’s leadership to a greater extent than any president in modern times. Whatever the likes of Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz might have to say about the virtues of banning TikTok, if Trump decides to lift the ban they’ll take care to say it sotto voce. And the phony China hawks of the MAGA base certainly won’t make a fuss: It should be trivially easy to convince an “America First” movement that we have no quarrel with a government that loathes Western liberalism.

 

There are many “deals” to be cut between two postliberal administrations. TikTok could plausibly be the first. Give Trump a cut of the platform’s revenue—the way things are going, the bribe wouldn’t even need to be disguised—or assure him that, going forward, the algorithm will amplify his propaganda alongside the CCP’s. The rout in American opinion in TikTok’s favor has prepared the ground for a White House capitulation. Just pay him.