Trump gives a detailed answer on why he returned to a TikTok ban

Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday offered a blustery and confusing explanation for why he changed his mind on whether the United States should ban TikTok over concerns that its Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.

In a CNBC interview, Mr. Trump said he still considers the social media app a threat to national security, but that banning it would drive young people “crazy.” He added that any action that harms TikTok would benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”

“Honestly, there are a lot of people on TikTok who love it,” Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”

“There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but what I don’t like is that without TikTok you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook an enemy of the people. , along with much of the media.”

Trump tried to ban TikTok during his time in office, prompting Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the platform to a new owner or face being blocked from US app stores. A House committee last week proposed legislation that would similarly force TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance.

In a strong show of bipartisanship — rare in Washington these days — top Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Chinese Communist Party’s House Select Committee used nearly identical language to describe TikTok’s risks.

The Republican chairman, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, said that “America’s main adversary has nothing to do with controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.” And his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, said TikTok “poses a critical threat to our national security” as long as it is owned by ByteDance.

But as the bill was being considered, Trump said last week on Truth Social, his social media platform, that “if you get rid of TikTok,” it would double Facebook’s revenue. He said he didn’t want Facebook to “do better.”

The full House is expected to vote on the legislation on Wednesday. President Biden said last week he would sign the measure into law if it reached his desk.

To support his “enemy of the people” claim, Mr. Trump has cited grants that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg provided to state and local election offices in 2020 to help their voting administration during the pandemic. Mr. Trump suggested that Mr. Zuckerberg, whose website was part of the Trump 2016 campaign victory strategy, should receive jail time for these donations.

Mr Trump also claimed that Facebook was as beholden to China as TikTok. Facebook is blocked in the country and attempts by parent company Meta to return have been unsuccessful. The company has steps taken to sell its virtual reality headsets there.

The CNBC interviewer asked Mr. Trump about suspicions that he was “paid” to change his views on TikTok after meeting with a major TikTok investor, billionaire Jeff Yass.

Mr. Trump and his team are working feverishly to find new major donors as he heads toward a general election against Mr. Biden, who, along with allied groups, has far more money behind him.

Mr. Trump met this month with the world’s second-richest man, Elon Musk, and at a recent event hosted by the conservative group the Club for Growth, Mr. Trump reportedly praised Mr Yass called it ‘fantastic’. The Club for Growth recently made a rapprochement with Mr. Trump after many months of freeze.

Mr Yass, previously a fierce critic of Mr Trump, appears to have had his own change of heart. An official at a pro-Trump super PAC declined to say whether Mr. Yass had donated money to the outside group, but a person close to the campaign said the Trump team expected a significant donation from Mr. Yass to one of the external groups that provided support. the former president.

Mr Yass has funded a major campaign in Washington to stop the ban on TikTok. He and his allies have recruited several former Trump administration officials to help in the effort — including Tony Sayegh, a Treasury Department official, and Kellyanne Conwaywho was a senior advisor to the president.

In the CNBC interview, Mr. Trump denied discussing TikTok with Mr. Yass during their meeting.

“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Trump said, saying it was a brief meeting with Mr. Yass and his wife. “He never mentioned TikTok.”

Mr. Trump’s criticism of the new legislation is notable because of his decision to restrict the company during his time in office. An executive order he signed in August 2020 said TikTok’s data collection from its users “threatens to give the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” It added that TikTok could be used to spread disinformation that benefited Beijing.

“These risks are real,” the executive order said.

The Trump administration has decided to block Apple and Google’s app stores from offering TikTok due to concerns over Chinese ownership of the app. But federal courts have repeatedly ruled that Trump’s TikTok ban would not go into effect.

ByteDance appeared to reach a deal to sell a stake in TikTok to Oracle, a cloud computing company whose executives had ties to Mr. Trump. The takeover never materialized as legal challenges to Trump’s ban made their way through the courts.

Mr. Trump acknowledged in his CNBC interview that highly paid lobbyists shaped the government’s handling of TikTok.

Congress, Mr. Trump said, is “extremely subject to people called lobbyists who happen to be very talented, very good and very rich.”

“I could have banned TikTok,” he added, “I could have pretty much gotten it banned, I could have made it happen. But I said, ‘You know what, but I’ll leave it up to you.’